A 30-something new mom wrote in new Harper’s Bazaar piece that she resented her growing baby bump while pregnant so much she wanted to suck it in.
That’s right! Her baby!
The author, Annie Davies, explained being ashamed over this admission.
Davies writes in the piece:
And I felt guilty for admitting I wanted to; terrified that my ambivalence would translate into how I would feel for my soon-to-be-born child. Shouldn’t the bump have been the easy part? After all, we live in a culture that venerates pregnancy-as-accessory.
There are Pinterest pages and Tumblrs devoted to best celebrity maternity style. More and more designers are creating maternity capsule collections. Pregnancy looks good. Stylish. Sexy. I knew it. I saw it. But despite hours of perusing pregnancy style and hundreds of dollars spent on various maternity outfits, I simply couldn’t feel it.
It turns out , she had sculpted the image of a free spirit and dressed herself, got piercings and tattoos to match how she wanted others to see her as. It reads like she was a wannabe hipster, apparently.
Davies continues:
Part of it was because I simply didn’t identify as a mom. When I found out I While I absolutely wanted this child, I wasn’t sure how the persona I’d spent my entire adult life cultivating would would mesh with middle-of-the-night feedings and spit-up covered clothing.
In “Bringing Up Bebe”, a book on how the French do parenting right that became my bible throughout my first trimester, one of author Pamela Druckerman‘s key theses is that French women don’t make motherhood their whole identity. Druckerman explains that in Parisian parks, that unless a child is clinging to her and calling her maman, it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether a woman is a mother. I aspired to that European model, absent of cutesy phrases like mom jeans and mom blogs and mom’s nights out.
Davies wrote how she wanted to emulate friends she had who never talked about their children and deliberately kept their family and work life different.
Not only did she want to shield signs of her pregnancy, Davies says she was even awkward dealing with all the extra attention and other unspoken rules and office politics that come with pregnancy.
She further explained:
While the physical transformation was disconcerting, being so obviously identified as a soon to be mother felt bizarre; full of rules I didn’t understand. Appearing in public meant I constantly had to steel myself for the looks like a boy! (it wasn’t) shouts from strangers on the street and affirm to the barista that no, I didn’t want decaf coffee. At around 34 weeks pregnant, I was asked if I would be willing to potentially appear on a television segment talking about a magazine article I wrote. Of course, I wrote to the PR person, just FYI I’m going to be eight months pregnant …
I stopped after I typed those words, then deleted them. Would an expecting father ever have said something similar? Of course not. Regardless of whether or not I looked pregnant had nothing to do with whether or not I could competently discuss my work. And yet, I found myself almost instinctively apologizing, as if my pregnancy had somehow fundamentally changed me.”
In the end, Davies discovers after giving birth to her daughter Lucy this past April that a baby does become part of your life and it isn’t that easy to fragment it away, even if you tried.
Even after boasting in the article about being able to wear a bikini a few weeks after delivery, Davies says she has changed in her feelings and now would do it again differently.
Next time, she would actually decorate and flaunt her bump more.
Interesting…you thoughts on this one?
Read the entire piece HERE!