pregnancy redux

personal lessons in two pregnancies, eight years apart

I am pregnant, again.

I am not the type of person that enjoys pregnancy the way I am perhaps expected to. To say this out loud means I am also required to remind society that I do (very much) love being a mother, because of the looks I get when I complain or fail to immediately smile. There is always a lot to say about the matter of gendered parenthood, and a lot of what is said tends to miss the mark for me.

Today, I’m reflecting on how my pregnancies have occurred at two drastically different moments of my life. This has afforded me a reflective lens on how pregnant people are treated depending on their age and socioeconomic status. While I sometimes feel as though I’m conning myself into a long-term social experiment, I do find some internal peace going through this again. A second time means knowing the ropes and affirming that my younger self was indeed treated as poorly as she thought. 

I will put it as plainly as I can: when you are poor or young (or both), getting pregnant is seen as irresponsible, as a personal failure. Pregnancies at the socially appropriate moment and with financial security are deemed a blessing. Poverty feels like a quiet wedge in the broader societal narratives around pregnancy and motherhood these days: we’re surrounded by discourse on tradwives and Hey Mamaaa rhetoric, and ignore the undercurrent that comes with the loss of reproductive rights and abortion care in America. With that, who becomes a mother matters. It is not just a privilege of the wealthy to choose to bring children into this world, and never has been. There are many who navigate profoundly different realities of early parenthood. Even in Canada, if you live outside of a metropolitan area, it can be very difficult to access reproductive services (including Planned Parenthood) or avoid fake abortion clinics run by strict pro-life Christians.

Within this context, how we think about (and stigmatize) young mothers, single mothers, and early parents is an important consideration – there are and will continue to be young parents. I don’t think that society has fully grappled with the reality of child-rearing outside of the ideals it maintains, positioning mothers as either teen mum folly for MTV or nurturing and billowing in linen sundresses. I am not saying my experience is the full reality of every young mother out there, but I hope that in sharing it, it adds some texture to the context of young motherhood.  

early catholic influences

My childhood reflected a hyper-traditional approach to gender in relationships, marriages, and parenting dynamics. I grew up in a small town in Ontario just north of Toronto (north enough that we wouldn’t be including the Greater Toronto Area). I was raised Irish Catholic, which presents very strict understandings of gendered duties early on. I went to a Catholic high school where sex education was not presented (at the time – if that’s been updated, please let me know). There was a convenient daycare attached to my high school, so all the young girls could go visit their babies in between classes. It felt twisted, even then, to have such a disconnect from the very real experience for these young women: they were being thrown to the lion’s den of motherhood while we watched from the literal sidelines.

A friend of mine got pregnant at 14 – in my childhood naïveté, I was happy for her. I was quickly shushed by peers and community members for “encouraging” my friend’s unprotected sex at such a young age. Yet all these teenagers hustled incredibly hard to provide a life for their children and themselves and have done so successfully and through many challenges.

I had no idea how difficult it was for them until I ended up pregnant at a decently young age (for me, but not for the context I grew up in). Friends backed away in fear that it was contagious, that I was no longer fun or light or breezy. I carried a weight, a reminder of what could happen to them if they weren’t careful. I was, as one charming restaurant co-worker described it, “a walking reminder to take birth control.”

the pregnancies

I was 23 years old the first time I got pregnant. I had just moved from Winnipeg to Toronto, dyed my hair purple, gotten a job working as a host at a vegan restaurant, was finishing up my masters, and about to start a PhD. I was too broke to be able to afford a printout ultrasound, too stressed to consider what sort of nursery room I wanted to decorate (I was living in a one-bedroom apartment, so also not even an option), and too sad about my Nana’s recent passing to think about birth plans or swaddling strategies.

I had never married, and the news of me having a baby was not greeted with many warm welcomes. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, I felt determined to show the vague world I could do it despite the doubts. In that climate, I saw getting a PhD as the way I could create financial security for me outside of the hospitality industry, and to provide for this unborn child down the (long, meandering, pandemic-bumpy) road.

Being pregnant so young was dehumanizing in some ways. You are a billboard of forgetting to wrap up, and the public court feels entitled to express opinions, judgements, and expectations onto you. It didn’t matter what my GPA was, that I had PhD scholarships, that I was smart or funny, or that I had a lot of experience working with kids in swimming lessons that I absolutely adored. All that mattered was that I had fucked up and gotten pregnant ahead of a loosely constructed “schedule” of how life is supposed to go in the 21^st century. As it turns out, you’re supposed to date, then get married, then buy a small starter house (with your millionaire parents’ money), then buy a tester dog, and only then – when the dog is starting to loose hip stability – are you allowed to start “trying” for a kid. Oops! 

This time, I am 32. There is one important distinction in these two phases of my life, which is the security that plays across a few components of my world. I have a secure job (not a short-term contract), secure personal routine (the safety to balance responsibility with my wellbeing), secure romantic relationship (and the peace afforded through that), and a safe home to live in.

These are privileges I did not have last time, and I am grateful for all of them. I am also grateful for how much work I put into my life to make sure my daughter and I could be here now, where I don’t always have to stretch the -$135 in my bank account for two weeks. With these securities, I am offered a place to unpack the difficulties of the first pregnancy and my time single parenting in Toronto.

food intake and fetal development

In a healthcare setting, the pregnancy idealism plays out quietly when you’re young – no one that I came across in the hospital was flicking back shots of tequila in the staff coat roam while telling me I was fucked up for having a kid so young (like they did at work). Rather, in these medical rooms, there was a hush. An assumption of stupidity. A lack of communication about what was happening to my body, why it was happening, and how.

I had epilepsy as a kid, and while my seizures have thankfully been in remission since I was 8 years old, it means that my first pregnancy was a higher risk one due to the potential of having a seizure during childbirth or surrounding complications. I was put in the care of high-risk OB-GYNs in Toronto, at Mount Sinai (who are great, for the record, at this task).

Despite having whirlwind of feelings about becoming a mother in my twenties, I was also riddled with worry that my child would have some sort of neurological complications in their development. I was struggling to put on weight in pregnancy (relationship situation, intense vomiting and nausea all through the pregnancy, financial precarity, and the stress of my Master’s thesis data sets not being good enough). I couldn’t keep any prenatal vitamins down but knew that folic acid was the big-ticket item for my baby to be okay, neurologically speaking.

It's within this dynamic of food intake and fetal development where the vastly different approaches by my pregnancy healthcare professionals appear the most. In both instances, I expressed my concerns about not being able to keep any food down through the duration of my pregnancy. I reminded my healthcare providers of my family history with neurological development conditions (stressing that I was taking these risks seriously despite my purple hair) and asked for their guidance on how to best navigate this.

When I was 23, I was told to do a better job of eating. They blew past my concerns and focused on theirs: that I was vegetarian then, so the baby couldn’t possibly get enough nutrients from plants. I had reiterated that only saltines were staying down, so no amount of prescribed meat would stay down either. They recommend me to a nutritionist, who told me to eat more cottage cheese and salmon. In response, I barfed in her waste bin at the thought of that chunky monstrosity. In a similar vein, when I would ask my healthcare professionals about some of the complications surrounding my daughter’s birth, I was met with shrugs and silences.

When my due date was December 16^th and there was still no baby by December 23^rd, I was told to book an induced labour for some unspecified time in “early January” despite losing important fluids at that point and feeling significantly less fetal movement than I should have been. When I finally managed to have an induction scheduled for December 24^th, no one showed up to do it until the next day. I was told again and again (either verbatim or through actions) that what I was experiencing was not worth their time. But my daughter was born not breathing, and my concerns leading up to this were not an overreaction. 

I prepared myself for battle presenting the same concerns this time around. I was ready to be met with vehement disagreement with what I felt or experienced to be true. And yet, my doctor prescribed an anti-nausea pill without blinking. I am sure there are other factors involved, including different cities of care, different ages of the doctors, but I was heard in that examining room and provided an anti-nausea drug that afforded me a liveable situation with food. When I ask my OB-GYN about strategies to help with nutrition, or questions about placenta placement and what it means, I’m gifted answers. I am sure that being older and more assertive about my health has helped, but I am still surprised at how much easier it all is now that I’m in my thirties.

age and money

The privileges of this second pregnancy have shown me with clarity what a disservice we are doing for anyone that becomes a parent outside of the idealist zones for child-rearing in current society.

There was a recent story coming out of Hamilton about a woman who gave birth to a baby in one of the encampments within the city. A medical emergency was declared because the umbilical cord could not be cut. But instead of looking at how someone needing medical care was not provided it, the CBC article gave more affordances to counsellor’s election agendas. In it there were calls for increasing police enforcement over how to face the reality of a landscape that doesn’t afford accessible housing or medical care to those living in encampments. We are living in a society where a woman giving birth in an encampment tent is a call for more policing, rather than more dignified healthcare.

In addition to poverty restrictions and stigma, age impacts how pregnancy is perceived. In 21^st century North American lifestyles, that the period of late teens to early twenties is still a time of becoming. It is a time where young adults are painted as uprooted and unsure of themselves. The reality of being a young parent is to be in a liminal identity, where you are seen as too young to be responsible, but also come home from a day of minimum wage jobs to care for your baby. The public is loud and quick with its judgement of these “outlier” parenting dynamics. I was commonly confused on Toronto playgrounds for my daughter’s nanny, and commonly corrected for my “irresponsible” decisions to let my toddler out in the October air without a hat (which she had thrown into Lake Ontario while cackling at me).

The healthcare domain, the communities we participate in, and the way we speak about other people’s babies online can be a social metric for belonging and support during pregnancy. When you are young or poor, these spaces are not immediately welcoming. Think about the copious jokes around Mama Facebook groups – how they ask for homeopathic remedies for kids skyrocketing fevers. These assume a built-in wealth (of time or money) and access to these sorts of out-of-pocket alternative practitioners. Even breastfeeding is a privilege of time, an ability to have a paid maternity leave and the space and resources to eat enough and provide enough breast milk. I had no maternity leave, and no time to pump milk, instead faced with the shame of not being “naturally” good enough and having to use formula. 

I thought about all of this when I was the 23-year-old purple-haired kid in the waiting room, being ignored two to three hours past my appointment time while mid-thirties women in sensible sundresses brushed past me with their expensive handbags and sensitive time restrictions. Now that I am the 32-year-old that can afford maternity jeans and regularly uses a hairbrush, I feel my time is perceived as mattering more in the doctor’s office.

In a twist, during my most recent OB-GYN check-up I spotted a younger woman with Billie Eilish green and black streaks painted through her hair, Doc Martens, and ripped jeans. She was nervously sitting beside me with a small bump herself. I smiled at her, remembering my similar position eight years ago. I made the baby bump small talk (congratulations, how many weeks are you?) and tried through it to let her know that I do see her. I wondered what world she is giving birth in compared to mine then, or mine now. I hope it’s a better one, but I don’t think it can be until people stop judging so much. 

Paid Subscriber News

Next Friday’s post for paid subscribers (February 16th) will be a transcript of an interview with seed keeper and land protector Tiffany Traverse, where she speaks with me on the work she’s doing at Fourth Sister Farm and how it connects to a broader community of seed keepers across Turtle Island fostering Indigenous food and land sovereignty. We also discuss the importance of Land Back and the ways we can do more to help Indigenous land and water protectors continue their efforts.

Podcast Updates

The podcast has returned for the second half of the 8th season, with some really exciting and thought-provoking interviews. I’ve included a summary of January episodes to check out! I’ve linked their show notes pages but would encourage a listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

• Chef Ruben Rodriguez on the maternal and ancestral influences on his Spanish tapas restaurants across NYC, and how he and his team shaped their work through pandemic restrictions.

• Author and marketing expert Jeff Swystun on the untold history of TV dinners — how marketing tales were spun as fact, and how it’s informed our relationship with gendered work and current frozen foods.

• Educator and advocate Emily Wright on her personal experiences using Ozempic as a Type 2 diabetes management drug, how it resulted in an extreme case of gastroparesis (stomach paralysis), and how to navigate the real uses and pitfalls of a drug that is predominantly known as an off-label weight loss drug.

• Embody Lib founder Patrilie Hernandez on anti-fat discourses in health and nutrition, colonial histories that have shaped cultural values around food and hierarchies, and how she’s working to create body liberation with individuals and communities.