Body Building, part three: A second adolescence

Welcome to Body Building, a series on strength, selfhood, pregnancy, and the uncertain future.

This story will be spread out in occasional installments over the next couple of months as part of our usual content mix while She’s A Beast is on a self-created, pre-programmed but nonetheless handcrafted “maternity leave.”

I staggered out of the bedroom into the kitchen, and grasped onto the kitchen island. My stomach was gently roiling, meaning I had to put something in there. But as soon as I left the bed I was swept with the feeling of being overwhelmingly physically exhausted, like a hangover plus a powerlifting meet the previous day. It was then I knew that attempting one of my lifting normal workouts the previous day had been a huge, huge mistake.

This was week 8 of being pregnant, the very middle of my first trimester. I was relieved to find that morning sickness was virtually a non-problem for me—I’d be a little queasy in the morning, but eating breakfast helped; eating two breakfasts before 10 a.m. helped even more. But nothing shook my exhaustion. 

It was more than exhaustion—it was more like a bone-deep, brain-deep, biological opposition to doing anything that involved work or being productive. The idea of writing produced a full-body revulsion the likes of which I’ve never known, and that’s saying something for someone with as intractable a procrastination problem as I have. Even if I could bring myself to type out some words, my ability to care whether they made any impact or even sense was gone. I wouldn’t have believed it could be so consuming a feeling, a true zombification beyond my own will, if it weren’t happening to me.

The only kind of task I could bear was cooking, so on days I had the energy I threw myself into making food. I’ve always hated the tee-hee of “pregnant women be having cravings,” and was sort of relieved to find I didn’t actually have insatiable cravings. I did have what I will call “food whims,” as well as “food aversions.” I couldn’t stomach shrimp, but for a while I was really into pasta with just butter and parmesan. Berry muffins. Chicken congee. Lots of instant ramen. I’d make these foods and then carry them back to bed while I marathoned bad TV. The total effect was feeling a little bit hungover, every day: tired, listless, just nauseous enough that certain foods made my stomach turn (including alcohol. I was resentful, in fact, to be finding out only now that what people characterize so cutely as “cravings, tee-hee” might actually be women clinging to the only shred of a daily routine that still makes sense.

I always worried about losing my tenuous sense of self in various experiences: moving, college, changing jobs, taking medication. My greatest fear in having kids was that I would become subsumed into this mothering role, not just practically as a matter of cultural forcing, but biologically, somehow, swept away in a torrid river current of hormones that walled off everything I’d previously cared about and cornered me into a consciousness where my only awareness was of baby. And now here I was, brain and body fully on strike; sleeping 15 hours a day; unable to carry out any but the most stereotypical of womanly tasks, cooking and then cleaning up after.

Exercise usually energizes me, which was why I gave lifting a shot at 8 weeks. At that point, I was pretty used to motivational bootstrapping for a workout, and I tried to use lighter weights than usual. I’ve ratcheted my workouts back and rebuilt my strength from scratch countless times in ten years; I had no problem with sandbagging. But this made it especially unjust when working out just made me even more tired the next day. I next tried my Hotel Special workout, and even that was too much. I could barely handle 15 minutes of regular walking without making my exhaustion even worse the next day. 

By this time, I’d heard many stories from women about how they’d had to leave lifting aside in their first trimesters, and then just never made it back, even years later. I feared my visions of the Stepford-Wife-type change of becoming a parent that haunted me wouldn’t even wait until the baby was born, and instead would turn out to begin at conception. 

I’d heard also, of course, that being pregnant can be tiring or uncomfortable. But I was surprised not just how specific some of the feelings were, but how all-encompassing they felt, how resistant they were to my usual remedies. No amount of sleep provided any relief to tiredness; taking a break from work only raised the question of “why work, ever.” If there was thing I was able to always, always do, it was to work myself into a lather about not doing enough, fast enough. But now it was like I was looking down at the bottom of a well, where my sense of obligation toward “doing” sat. 

This went on for about a month, which is longer than I’ve ever been properly sick, and a very long time to not know if this was just my new personality now. Can’t write, can’t think, can’t get up, don’t care, no facility for anything except watching TV and consuming food. I watched all of Girls, both seasons of Traitors. If this was what pregnancy was, I didn’t think I could do it. Every day I wondered, half-seriously, if I should bail.

But then around week 10, the symptoms started to lift.