I’m reading a book called The Girls, which is about a set of conjoined twins. One of the twins becomes pregnant. Two things she says about pregnancy resonate with me:
– “Having been born, as Ruby and I were intended to be born, joined at the skull, we are normal to ourselves. It’s normal for me and Ruby to be who we are and to live as we do. But being pregnant did not feel normal. For the first time in my life, I felt fully freakish and monstrously, hideously, deformed.”
– “…my delight and my horror, and my misery and my bliss, at the occupation of my body.”
Okay, so I don’t truly feel freakish, or monstrously hideously deformed, nor would I say I’ve experienced “horror.” But it does feel peculiar, this possession by baby.
I joked to friends that for most of my pregnancy (and even after while the hormone fluctuations were at their peak) I felt like a really big science experiment–not exactly freakish, but definitely not business as usual.
It is crazy, isn’t it? Before I started having children, I don’t think I’d ever carefully thought through just how bizarre reproduction is. We grow babies INSIDE. OUR. BODIES. Doesn’t that seem NUTS?