Hmmmm....

Istanbul, 2011

So it's hard to describe what it feels like to be pregnant.

I mean, I could bore you with how it feels, physically, but that's not really what I mean.

It's a really strong pull to meet this little person who is using my internal organs as his punching bags.

It's exciting, and such a transformative experience that the only thing I can liken it to is the weeks before leaving home for college, when you know this new life is ahead of you and have no capacity to picture it.

Or it's like when you are very young and someone says the word 'husband' and you have this vague image in your mind of what that word might mean to you someday, but you cannot see his face. Maybe he'll have a beard, you think.

Carrying another human being, in your body, is a bit like trying to picture that face, all those years ago.

It's like waking up one day and being told that blue is actually green.

You have conversations, but it's almost like they're in another language. You lose the thread of them because you can't unremember for even a second, that another person (a person who will become one of the most important people in your world but who is as of now still a stranger/alien) has colonized your body. And he is kicking you. From the inside.

It is not that you are obsessed with the baby, or babies, or pregnancy, or motherhood. You don't want to become the walking cliche. You have all these other things that you are passionate about.

But it's like you are standing in the middle of the stream, neck deep, maybe balancing on one leg, just trying not to get pulled under, and someone is quizzing you about world events. Like, say, Syria or the social security conundrum. But all you can think to reply is 'Anyone notice that I am up to my neck in the middle of this stream?' as they look at you like you're becoming very boring and self-centered.

Does this make any sense?

What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that in the thick of all this gestating and future-imagining, I just don't feel like...myself.

I go to leap up from the couch and find I have no core strength to speak of. I feel restless, and want to go for a five mile walk, but run out of steam after twenty minutes. Things don't taste the same, and even my emotions seem kind of, well, tampered with, as if I'm being pulled in a multitude of directions by invisible strings. I can't really predict my reactions to anything, and feel like I know myself less than before.

I look around at other pregnant ladies, and it seems totally insane that this is such a universal human experience. It's like being told that the world is, in fact, flat.

And so I look forward to meeting the baby. But also to having my body (and brain) back. To myself. To being alone in my own skin.