We’ve been served images of fecund bliss for generations, from the swelling curves of the 40,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels fertility totem carved from mammoth ivory, to the bouncy Instagrammers funding maternity leave through “cute pregnancy style!” affiliate links.
But pregnancy, for many Millennial women in particular, seems to be the ultimate “expectation vs reality” bait and switch, riddled with exhaustion, physical discomfort, health and identity crises and anxiety. “Totally robbed,” is how one new mother described it.
Another woman told me she found herself eating soap, powerless to resist the craving, and likened the feeling of the baby moving around inside her to the “chestburster” scene in “Alien,” where a writhing creature emerges with memorable violence.
There are also societal side effects: the sudden liberty that other people take with your body: strangers touching your belly without permission, commenting on how big you are.
“When I told my male co-workers, it was like they were terrified of me. They couldn’t look at me,” said one woman. “Whereas the women, they’re excited for you, but there’s also this weird, toxic ‘you’ll be fine because I was fine.’” She struggled in her pregnancy, vomiting throughout all nine months, and an older woman told her to toughen up because “you’re not sick, you’re just pregnant.”
Another woman noted the suffocating need to caveat complaints. “You have to preface it. Like, ‘I’m so grateful I’m pregnant, but I really hate throwing up five times a day.’” she said. “Why do you have to preface it, like ‘I’m so happy, but I really hate feeling like my crotch is going to fall out every time I stand up?’”
Perhaps most onerously, pregnancy can also take a mental health toll. One woman, who’d previously struggled with anxiety, found herself “overwhelmed” by it when she was pregnant. “I’ve never been so stressed in my life,” she said. “I broke down and bawled in my OB’s office.” She felt fortunate that her doctor took this seriously.
“You’re just so rushed in those appointments,” said another woman. “It’s like, ‘Let’s hear the heartbeat, let’s measure the stomach, you’re good to go,’ unless you bring it up. Even then you almost feel like, ‘But I’m having a hard time,’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah, you’re pregnant.’”
One woman, gripped by a fear of dying in childbirth, brought up her worries with her doctor, who dismissed her request for a C-section. “She told me, ‘No, you’ll be pushing like everyone else,’” she said. “In retrospect, it was good for me because she never gave in to my neurosis, and I had no complications. But I ended up with crazy postpartum depression and anxiety.”
“The sweet, uneventful pregnancy is not the norm,” said Dawn Kingston, a researcher, mental health clinician and author of the new book ”Your Brain On Pregnancy.” In fact, she says mental health challenges are in the top three symptoms of pregnancy, affecting an estimated one in four women. “Stress, anxiety and depression often come together in this toxic cocktail.”
Kingston said the biggest predictor for this is struggles with mental health before pregnancy — yet many women who have been on medication stop taking it in the misguided belief that it might harm their baby.
Often, the symptoms are blamed on hormonal changes. “The hormone contribution is actually pretty low,” said Kingston. Risk factors include a lack of support network, partner conflict, and high stress. “This evidence has been around for a long time. The idea that stress influences our well-being and the well-being of a baby is 30 years old. It’s just shocking to me that it hasn’t been paid attention to.”
In Kingston’s research spanning the past decade, a common theme emerged: a desire for more honesty. “Well over ninety per cent of women said to us, ‘If someone asked me a question about how I was doing emotionally, I would be honest and tell them.’ The problem is people aren’t asking,” she said.
They also often feel caught off-guard by how difficult pregnancy is. “When women make comments like, ‘I didn’t think it would be this,’ they’re talking about being unprepared. What they’re experiencing is not rare or unusual, it’s just silent,” said Kingston. “We don’t serve women well if we don’t prepare them ahead of time, prepare their partners and their families.”
Screening tools are one place to start. “Women don’t know if feeling a little bit anxious is normal or more worrisome,” said Kingston. “Women could self-screen and realize, ‘Oh, I’m only a two on this scale, I’m nowhere near in trouble.’” Or that it’s something to speak to a professional about, such as consistent dread or fear that impacts sleep patterns.
This could also be a nudge to get help with unresolved trauma, said Kingston. Being terrified of miscarrying, for instance, may be linked to older loss and grief. “We’ve been knocked about by life experiences, and not all of us had the benefit of having someone walk through it with us.”
Therapist Erica Djossa, founder of the maternal mental health practice Momwell, said these conversations often come up after the fact. “I do a lot of work unpacking the unsustainable load of motherhood, and how we got to where we are. When we start to back it up to the origin, we find that it begins in pregnancy,” she said. “You’re handed this backpack of tasks, sometimes as early as trying to conceive.”
We’re currently in “the era of intensive mothering,” said Djossa. This starts in pregnancy, when many women let their own wants — what they eat, what they do with their time — be subsumed by prioritizing the baby. “That is draining. I just don’t think we are told how our autonomy or independence shifts.”
Often, women feel their partner is not experiencing the same intense changes. “That juxtaposition can be resentment-inducing,” Djossa says. “That starts in pregnancy and continues into motherhood.”
“There’s a constant bombardment of misinformation, conflicting advice and shaming comments in Facebook groups.”
Adding to the mental load is the fact that in the social media age, we’re exposed to endless information and opinions. “What is the actual thing that I can eat right now? Can I eat deli meat? What is the risk here?” Djossa said, by way of example. “There’s a constant bombardment of misinformation, conflicting advice and shaming comments in Facebook groups. When our parents were pregnant, their mom group would have been their entire exposure to that.”
It doesn’t help when we compare ourselves to everyone else’s maternal highlight reel. “We’re observing everybody in their maternity photos, looking like they’ve got it together in their matching outfits, and we can’t even get off the couch or out of bed,” Djossa said. “We’re so vulnerable, especially as a first-time mom.”
This is compounded by the myth that maternal instinct will kick in once you’re pregnant. “We’re told we’re built for this, so when we realize, ‘I hate this,” and ‘I actually don’t really know what to do,’ we start to doubt ourselves as mothers,” Djossa said. “We start to ask, ‘Was I not supposed to be a mom? Am I not cut out for this?’”
Often, these feelings are accompanied by shame, so we go quiet. “If we’re not talking about it, we aren’t connecting with others to realize that this is a very common, if not universal, experience,” Djossa said. “When the reality doesn’t meet our expectations, it’s not because we’re flawed or broken. It’s because these things haven’t been talked about.”
