Motherhood - Misconceptions

Excerpted from
Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood
By Naomi Wolf

Experts

Faced with something new and unclear, I turned to the experts: I went to the bookstore and began to read. Like pregnant women all over the country, and millions of women worldwide, I reached for What to Expect When You're Expecting.

I quickly developed a love-hate relationship with that book; I found it often obfuscating and condescending-yet I needed it. This particular pregnancy guide, with its cozy line drawings of suburban white women in rocking chairs, annoyed me more than any of the other books did. Moreover, the reason it annoyed me was the same reason that, when in physical distress, I returned to it again and again-I and all the other expectant women in our millions. Why? Because, beyond the studies, science, statistics, and probabilities, it reassures.

As my pregnancy journey grew more profound and challenging, the book added ever more sunny infomercials to counter or paper over any dilemma I encountered. The book reassured me about every damn thing under the sun. Birth defects? Probably not in your case, never mind, don't fret. Been mainlining heroin? Not ideal, but why not stop today! Hard candies can ease those cravings! To my mind, its tone reassured at the expense of a full array of hard data-to the point where I began to feel a sort of shameful addiction to it, like a secret penchant for drinking. It made me feel worse, and better.

For example, its "Best-Odds Diet" offended me even as I tried to follow it. It offended me because it was just as unrealistic and controlling as any patronizing weight-loss system aimed at women. (From pages 85-86: "Green Leafy and Yellow Vegetables and Yellow Fruits: Three servings daily, or more. . . . Vitamin C foods: Two servings daily. . .. Other Fruits and Vegetables: Two servings daily. . . . Whole Grains and Legumes: Five servings daily, or more. . . .") You might as well just sit down with a crate of kale. According to a midwife I later got to know, it vastly overstates the amount of nutritious food you're supposed to cat deliberately, because the goal is to get you to eat some healthful foods.

Why do this?

This was my gut feeling: because we are too dumb, with only the facts presented to us, to moderate our intake like sensible bovines. I felt manipulated by the authors as I gazed, dumbfounded, at the sheer mountains of roughage prescribed day by day. I tried to imagine eating five servings of bran or other unmodified grain product before nightfall, servings of leafy green vegetables with every meal, and for between-meal snacks, a mound of citrus fruit. If you cat a muffin, you have "cheated." You cannot have even half a glass of wine "except for a celebratory half glass of wine on a birthday or anniversary, with a meal," because, though the studies on moderate alcohol intake show statistical insignificance, studies also show that pregnant hard-core alcoholics deliver compromised children. We can't be trusted with moderation. So drop that glass of white wine. Now.

I understood the authors' motivation. I simply resented what I guessed to be their core assumption: that, given the facts and left to draw sensible conclusions, a pregnant woman would veer like the sense-glutted harlot she really is into the slough of sugary desserts and the dark forest of wantonly emptied bottles of Bailey's Irish Cream.

With each of the pregnancy books I'd started to read, the cultural subtext grew clearer and clearer, and it did not make me comfortable. I could see it blinking red on black in my mind's eye like a Jenny Holzer slogan:

YOUR BABY NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED FROM YOU

Relatively early in my pregnancy, my friend Cara had a C-section, giving birth to a six-pound, nine-ounce girl named Daisy. Yasmin delivered a boy, Amos, after only a five-hour labor-thank God her baby was small, she said. Our friend Minnie also had a C-section, giving birth to a boy she and her husband named Luke.

Yasmin seemed to sail through her vaginal birth radiantly into motherhood; she put her career on hold and settled down on the green couch in her living room to nurse her baby, looking sleek and glowing.

When I ran into Minnie or visited Cara, however, I was unsettled: both women had been hardworking professionals, both had had surgery, both had husbands who went back to work after two weeks off, and both looked stricken and dazed. They were evasive when I asked how they were. Both looked as if they had just straggled out of the ruins of an earthquake, in shock, clutching their baby, the prize.

Woman after woman I encountered had C-sections, woman after woman seemed to have a hard time recovering, psychologically as well as physically. Each had a story of some drastic emergency in the birthing room. We all silently thanked heaven for a medical establishment that could save us and our babies.

In spite of all the evidence before us, my friends and I still believed that those "emergency" or C-section births were the exception. I would flip past the chapters on C-section in What to Expect When You're Expecting with slight irritation, that was for unusual emergencies, or for women with frail constitutions, I thought. I am strong and healthy; that won't happen to me. Some of the books I was reading supported me in my denial. A few even seemed to suggest that one reason some women don't "let go" enough in labor to avoid a cesarean is that modem working women, "used to controlling their lives," don't like to relinquish control.

Hell, I thought, I know how to lose control. So I dutifully ate my greens and took my folic acid, and my belly grew, and I skipped those pages.