Expecting: The inner life of pregnancy - Softcover

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Chitra Ramaswamy is an award-winning author and journalist. Her debut book won the Best First Book of the Year prize in Scotland’s National Book Awards and was nominated for the Polari Prize for books by LGBTQ+ writers. Her most recent book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship,  won Scotland’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message From The Skies and recently completed a commission from the Alasdair Gray Archive. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she is from London and lives in Edinburgh with her partner, two children, and rescue dog.  

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Introduction

Afterbirth   

When my son was a few weeks old I started writing my first book. This book. My milk came in and, finally, so did the words. I started to write, as Hélène Cixous put it, in the white ink of my milk. Neither came easy at first, but a decade on I wonder if the difficulty, the frustration, the tenderness, and the damn constraints were what birthed the book. That I wrote not in spite of the pram in the hall, but because of it.

Those early weeks of motherhood unfold in another, you might say, mothertime. The first six weeks, when I overcame the tyranny of the blank page (and established breastfeeding!), even have a name. An inadequate one, like so many of the words that issue from pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. They are known as the fourth trimester, as though it were the last stage of pregnancy and not the first of life.

So. There was this baby. The same one, I had to keep reminding myself in the hospital as I was confronted with the belly still mountaining before me, who roiled in there for nine months. Give or take. Because it’s not actually true – or convenient if you happen to be embarking on a book of nine essays charting the nine months of pregnancy – that a pregnancy invariably takes nine months. Many are more like ten. Mine included. 

Anyway. Back to the baby. Here he was with his elegant fingers, wise face, and my father’s nose, and yet still, in so many ways, still there, roiling in my womb. He was an internal organ that I carried around on my soft, leaking, also new person. He was an independent creature with his own bodily functions, which were produced by mine. He was a person, already. There he lay, arms and legs of his sleep suit trailing off his mini-limbs, snuffling on his back at the foot of the Moses basket. Sorry… Moses basket?! Yes. The bed where the baby (theoretically) sleeps is still, in the culture in which I gave birth, named after the Old Testament story of Moses, the infant left by his mother (in an act of protection not abandonment) in a wicker basket amongst the bulrushes of the River Nile. The language given to you by history when you are handed the baby is not just inadequate, it is often archaic. And without thinking much at all about it, I used it. I put the baby in the Moses basket. (Then, as history also dictates, he started crying so I took him out again.) 

At the same time changes were taking place in another impenetrable chamber of my body. My mind. Throughout my pregnancy I had been thinking about this book I might write. Which, in itself, was typical. Throughout my life I have carried ideas for books around with me like others carry house keys, but none had amounted to actual books. This one was different. To use a pregnancy term, it was viable. And so, for the rest of my pregnancy, this book of curious, digressive essays grew in my mind in tandem with the foetus fattening in my belly. I couldn’t write it, no, I was too busy with its subject, but I did start to read. 

What did I find? At first, very little. And as for books telling the stories of black, brown, and queer expectant and mothering bodies – which is to say, mine – even less. There was no Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts nor Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk. No Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers, Claire Kilroy’s Soldier, Sailor, or Olga Ravn’s My Work. Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels had not yet been translated and published in the UK. Avni Doshi hadn’t written Burnt Sugar. Sheila Heti hadn’t written Motherhood. Prescription was the order of the day in pregnancy and birth literature. Being told what to expect when you’re expecting seemed to mean being told what to do. There were exceptions but it is not easy to be an exception, which I would find out myself soon enough. If you are seen at all, and most likely you won’t be, you will be misunderstood, laden with responsibilities that aren’t yours, and punished. A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk was a tender, frank, and courageous psychical study, but look at the viciously misogynistic backlash with which it was met. 

The foetus kept doing his thing, and I did mine. I read Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Hélène Cixous, Margaret Atwood, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kathleen Jamie, and, always and forever, Toni Morrison. Then, casting the net more widely, Leo Tolstoy, Nan Shepherd, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. I became increasingly struck by how little I knew about what was happening to me, month by month. How little I understood the silences breeding across centuries. Silences in which my book would also, unsurprisingly, be engulfed. 

Mothering is a practical business. So, too, is writing. When I wrote Expecting, I was new to both roles, figuring things out at the level of the baby and the sentence. As I wrote the foetus in question transitioned from newborn to toddler. He crawled. He walked. He spoke. He jumped. He spun things. He tried to pluck the moon from the sky. Mothers still ask me how on earth I wrote a book during that time. The unsatisfactory answer, which is really why anyone writes a first book, is that I must have really, really wanted to. I made it happen in the way that no amount of willing can ever make a baby happen. (Trust me, I tried.) 

First, the structural stuff, which we ignore at our peril. I took voluntary redundancy from my full-time job as a journalist and with the money bought the gift which all mothers are desperate to be given. Time. (You can’t, unless you’re really loaded, buy sleep.) I looked after the baby and wrote. I paid a childminder to look after the baby and wrote. I jettisoned the advice to sleep while the baby slept – I never was any good at taking advice or sleeping during the day – and wrote. I wrote straight after feeds when the baby was sated, opening my laptop with buzzing breasts and brain. (Letdown is a very electric feeling.) I wrote on park benches, one hand tapping the black glass of a tablet, the other pushing the buggy back and forth in the unending project to keep the baby sleeping. I wrote instead of taking a shower. I wrote on the sofa while the baby lay in his jungle gym, opening and closing his fat fishmouth hands at the mirrors dangling on strings. I wrote as though my life, by which I mean my sense of self, depended on it. Which, in a way, it did. 

A memoir is a document of the times as well as a life. Rereading Expecting, I am struck by all that has happened, so much of it detrimental to women’s bodily autonomy, in the intervening years. It is beyond the scope (and word length) of this essay to list all the heartbreaking ways in which our rights have been dismantled during the last decade. I will mention only a few examples. Here in the UK, where I birthed and was birthed, the number of women dying during pregnancy or soon after childbirth has reached its highest level in almost twenty years. Asian women are twice as likely to die than white women during pregnancy or soon after birth. Black women are three times more likely. In Italy the right-wing government has ordered state agencies to cease registration of children born to same-sex couples, effectively removing mothers from their...