A Thought or Two

Being pregnant is weird. For any number of reasons, but today it's specifically weird because of what it's doing to my body.

Not the bloat. That sucks, but I'll get over it.

It's not even a lost sense of control, because I've never really had control over my body. It's been longer than I can remember since I've been able to know, much less control, whether I'll be able to walk without pain, or tolerate light from a migraine, or stand without my blood pressure dropping dangerously. Those are just factors of my everyday life. Regular exercise and a ridiculously healthy diet have certainly helped minimize those things, but I'd never say that I'm safely away from them, much less in charge of them.

Today I am weirded out by the sense of a loss of unity. Our very definitions of self and mental health in America are based on the notion that individuals are unitary--a person is one, and only one, defined by the boundaries of skin and distinction from others. More than one in a skin is mentally ill. And while I'm not ready to call Bugbear a person (and the "what counts as life?" question and abortion debates are for another day), I'm certainly no longer just one anything. I have a thing inside me that's probably more than 2", with a separate heartbeat, that responds to outside stimuli, and is certainly not me. Fascinating, but also disconcerting.

European and American philosophers, generally white males, have often had things to say about pregnancy. Michael is totally the expert here, and I hope he'll contribute his own thoughts and perspectives as well. But even though I'm not the expert, I've done enough ready to know that these discussions are always tinged with a sense of the exotic, of "she may be human, but that is totally foreign," often simultaneous awe and disgust or condemnation of the utterly unknown. I count myself fortunate to have fabulous, thoughtful, and caring online communities where I can go with my absurd questions and need to feel understood, but I also wish that there was more thought available to me from an historical perspective. I want to know how women have dealt with this in the last 7,000 years, what they have thought, how they and their cultures dealt with this now-bizarre notion that there's more than one in me, and that's fine, good, even.

Since I can't have that, and our followers are women, what do you say? How did you deal with the weirdness of your skin holding more than just you?