Footnotes on the First Trimester
Image licensed via Adobe Stock. Edited.
***Editor’s Note: The original version of this essay that appears in River Styx 108: Chronicles includes footnotes. Here, the footnotes have been converted to endnotes.***
“Literature has long since discovered and documented this place of which I thought myself to be the first inhabitant.”
—Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
“Every month I decide not to try / is a lungful of gold I can keep for myself. / Still, I worry you’ll come to me anyhow / & hitch your hiccupping bud. My dear / I don’t want to be got.”1 I promise Z we can try after the wedding. But on our honeymoon, I demur. It’s the tail-end of summer in a quaint Canadian town, where we fuck in the floral Airbnb bed, and in the hot tub, at the kitchen counter, on the living room floor. The sex is joyful, but there’s a question inside it. Each time, at the critical moment, I shake my head. He pulls out. Relieved, I imagine a long, good life, in which my body will always be mine.
Nearly a year earlier, before our engagement, we’d endured months of couples therapy, tense arguments, days of prickly silence. I wanted a wedding: a fabulous party, jaw-dropping dress, loved ones beaming in celebration. He wanted a child. The imbalance was clear—one was a day and the other a lifetime—but we also wanted each other. In the end, there could be no compromise, and the greater forfeit was mine. He would commit to me, and I would commit to a baby. “But I do know that for years I believed I should not have been anyone’s mother.”2
Back in our Philly row home, newly married, we have another fight. If not now, when? he says. How do I know you’ll ever be ready? I’m doing sit-ups and don’t have a satisfactory answer. “I like. To be alone. To hold my body. To sleep in my body. To listen to what. My body needs.”3 When he slams out the front door, I lower myself, vertebra by vertebra, to the rug. This exercise routine has kept my stomach flat and toned for decades. Is it shallow to cherish the look and shape of one’s own body? Is it selfish to tend that body above all else?
I consider the closed door, the empty house, a future in which I’m tied to no one and nothing.
Z returns in the dark and slips in bed with his back to me. Nuzzling close, I fit my knees to his, curve my chest around his spine. He raises his arm so mine can slide beneath. Outside, the moon shines cold through the blinds. OK, I say, knowing I will do anything to stay here. OK, we can try. “Self-sacrificing motherhood was what women were for, and women in many societies have believed this was their destiny.”4
We resume our rhythms together. I make the lunches. He walks the dog. On Wednesdays, we get silly drunk at the corner bar. Early in the morning, half asleep, the sex is still languid and good. “There was such a sweet, serious longing in him that I started to think that maybe it would be a good idea to go ahead, just rush ahead with that feeling of excitement—it was like being pulled along—although secretly I felt I didn’t want to.”5 Without contraception, an unknowable current tugs me. I’ve lowered the bridge, opened the gate, left the door unlocked. Now I could be swept away.
Even before my period is late, my body’s orientation shifts, as if I’ve risen from a chair to stand by a window. “I have the sense of stepping off the proper path of my life, of traveling forwards but at some unbreachable distance.”6
It’s only been a few weeks, but I buy a pregnancy test anyway. With Z downstairs, I shut myself in the bathroom. This is a familiar ritual, the white stick my trusted divination tool. How many times have I locked a door for this same purpose, how many long minutes have I waited, how many gods have I prayed to?
But today, mere seconds pass before two blue lines appear. For the first time ever, the stick predicts I will grow a child. Instinctively, I lift my shirt to examine my belly in the mirror—still flat. “What, I wonder, is the risk of disclosure in the country of motherhood?”7 The tiles are hard beneath my feet, the overhead light too bright. I’ve eluded this moment for so long, its arrival is dizzying.
My fear is not that I will be a bad mother—on the contrary, I know I will be caring and kind—but that love for my child will be an affliction, a compulsion that subjugates my own desires. “It’s in the enormity and inevitability of this love that the suffering lies.”8
“Love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before.”9
“I’m reminded that romantic longing, sexual passion, humiliation, desire—all these grand forces—are just wiped off the map by the animal love of parents for their children. And that’s how it should be.”10
“I love my son like I love life itself. I love my son more than I love my own life. This love wells up from . . . some pocket in my heart that makes room for newness, for beauty, for ghastliness, for humor, for banality, for all that life may contain.”11
“If women instinctively love their babies, why have so many women across cultures and through history directly or indirectly contributed to their deaths?”12
“Amid the labor and the drudgery—and, yes, the occasional magic—of child-rearing, I felt as if the edges of my body were being erased. I missed solitude. I missed the beckoning, empty rooms of my mind.”13
“For me being a parent is not a rational, appropriate, suitable option. Not because I can’t be a mother, but because it doesn’t suit me. It’s not who I am.”14
“There’s no adequate way to explain the extent to which having a child revises the illusion of self.”15
When I tell Z about the pregnancy, he eyes me cautiously. This is what he wanted, but I am an untrustworthy vessel. Neither of us knows what I will do. I don’t tell him I’ve called the abortion clinic.
“Motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence.”16
For days, we barely speak to each other. I make lunches. He walks the dog. On Wednesday, no one mentions the corner bar, though I crave a drink. The future has been wiped clean. How long, I asked the clinic, can I wait to decide? “Women have always been seen as waiting: waiting to be asked, waiting for our menses . . . waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.”17
I am six weeks pregnant. In Pennsylvania, I can have a medication abortion until ten weeks and an in-clinic abortion up to sixteen weeks and five days. But entering the second trimester of an unwanted pregnancy horrifies me, as does the surgical procedure, which is minor but invasive. Nor can I hover in this liminal space for long. So I set my sights on ten weeks. Four more weeks to determine the entire course of my life.
This, then, is the crossroads, the place where life unspools on either side. Down one road, I let the cells take root. I bear the child. I become a mother. On this road, Z and I continue together. Down the other road, I expel the cells. He leaves or we leave each other; I continue on alone. “It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality.”18 But we lose people all the time. I’ve lost many men before this.
I go to a doctor, then a midwife, then a psychic. “What if I pursue being a bad woman and don’t breed—pursue failing biologically?”19
Petite and pretty with jumpy eyes, the psychic leads me up dark stairs to a cozy, threadbare apartment, a tapestry-covered table. She shuffles her tarot deck, looking everywhere but at my face. “ ‘Now, this first card is the Three of Wands. You’ve walked to the end of something, and you think there’s nowhere to go . . . There’s something in you that knows how to keep walking, but something’s stopping you.’ ”20
She flips another card, swirls her hand across the table. I see you with the child, she says. A boy. You haven’t lost yourself.
At eight weeks, I bleed, and relief pools between my legs. “I would be an intellectual, a poet, an adventurer . . . There was no place in the arc of my imagined life for a child.”21 I think I’m having a miscarriage, I say from the bedroom door. Z’s concern envelops me, a welcome comfort after the thorny standoff of our last few weeks. We’ll try again, I assure him, already devising excuses.
But I don’t bleed for long, and there isn’t enough blood. By the time we arrive at the emergency room, I’m dry. The doctor is a young man, eager and anxious. When he asks if I’d like to hear the heart- beat, “I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.”22
The next morning, I fly to Iceland, a vacation planned before the cells took hold. My companions are young women in Patagonia jackets and hiking boots, activist women with causes and kayaks who leave lovers all around the world. “Was pregnancy interesting or was it half vile, half boring, like a rash or someone else’s long and disturbing dream?”23
We drive north for hours, on empty roads so straight and narrow, arrival seems impossible. When we stop, fierce winds threaten to rip the doors off our rental car. The desolate landscape triggers a queasy rebellion from my gut. “In early pregnancy the stirring of the fetus felt like ghostly tremors of my own body, later like the movements of a being imprisoned in me.”24 It’s late November, and the sun rises after ten and sets at four. Wherever we go, darkness engulfs us.
At a hot spring, the others strip cheerfully and plunge into the steaming water. I wade to my thighs, still wearing underwear, sweater, scarf, and hat. Naked and radiant, my friends pose with the sunset while I photograph. The metaphor is unbearable. “My sex has become [a] . . . lovingly furnished trap into which I have inadvertently wandered and from which now there is no escape.”25
On the flight to Philly, my elderly seatmate and I are both in tears. Before her husband died, she tells me, she quit the dance classes he loved. Now they’d never dance again. Mother to two grown children, traveling alone, she’s the kind of elegant, adventurous woman I’d like to be someday. “ ‘I was connected to Motherhood, this complex human experience, and suddenly the world got really big. An aperture opened in an instant. But as the world appears wider, I become smaller in comparison. This can be difficult for people . . . who see [themselves] as the protagonist of some grand story.’ ”26
Back home, Z is a distant lump of covers. I snuggle close, fit my knees to his, curve my chest around his spine. He raises his arm so mine can slide beneath. Outside the moon shines cold through the blinds. What will I do to stay here?
My inaction is a sieve and the days fall through. There is no moment when everything changes. Not when ten weeks comes and goes. Not when my son’s face rises from the depths of the sonogram screen. Not even the first time I hold him in my arms. But I put him to my breast. I soothe him to sleep. Motherhood doesn’t suit me, and I mother anyway.
The months and years pass. My son learns to draw. He collects crystals. He asks what death is. Sometimes he barrels toward me across the playground, and my love for him nearly knocks me down. And sometimes the world feels too wide, and I am small within it. Z and I separate.
In my new life, I live alone half the week in the three-bedroom house Z and I bought together. There are no lunches to make. I’m the only one who walks the old dog. On Wednesdays, I can meet whoever I’d like for drinks. Or do the decades-old exercise routine—my stomach is flat again, my body reclaimed. This temporary solitude is textured and expansive; I cherish it.
Later there will be grocery shopping, freelance assignments, the mortgage to pay. But now it is a beautiful October day, cool and clear, and all glorious afternoon I am no one’s mother. I’m writing in a sunbeam with the dog at my feet, and the psychic was right. The self is not lost.
Footnotes
1. Kiki Petrosino, “Confession,” The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, edited by Emily Pérez and Nancy Reddy, 2022, p. 7.
2. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Tenth Anniversary Edition, 1986, p. 32.
3. Jasminne Mendez, “Again,” The Long Devotion, 2022, p. 61.
4. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, 1999, p. 4.
5. Sheila Heti, Motherhood, 2018, p. 121.
6. Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2001, p. 19.
7. Shara Lessley, “ ‘Estranged, Changed, Suspended’: My Path to Plath,” The Long Devotion, 2022, p. 144.
8. Adrienne Rich, journal excerpt 1960, Of Woman Born, Tenth Anniversary Edition, 1986, p. 22.
9. Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood, 1995, p. 4.
10. Honor Jones, “The Only Two Choices I’ve Ever Made,” The Atlantic, 2022.
11. Katherine Meehan, “The Word for Love Is Wound,” Kenyon Review, 2021.
12. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature, 1999, p. xviii.
13. Molly Spencer, “I Stop Writing the Poem: On Motherhood and the Writing Life,” The Long Devotion, 2022, p. 100.
14. Debra, quoted in Regretting Motherhood: A Study, Orna Donath, 2017, p. 74.
15. Shara Lessley, “ ‘Estranged, Changed, Suspended’: My Path to Plath,” The Long Devotion, 2022, p. 142.
16. Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work, 2001, p. 15.
17. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, Tenth Anniversary Edition, 1986, p. 39.
18. Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance, 1995, p. 4.
19. Sheila Heti, Motherhood, 2018, p. 113.
20. Tarot reader, Sheila Heti, Motherhood, 2018, p. 143.
21. Chloe Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty: A Memoir, 2022, p. 250.
22. Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance, 1995, p. 9.
23. Kate Ristow, “Greta and the Baby,” The Cut, 2019.
24. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, Tenth Anniversary Edition, 1986, p. 63.
25. Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work, 2001, p. 25.
26. The author’s mother, Chloe Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty, 2022, p. 238.
Tobey Ward’s writing has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Solstice, and The South Carolina Review, among others. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon and lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a copywriter and makes TikToks.