“I know a woman who refuses to mother, refuses to do the most important thing, and therefore becomes the least important woman. Yet the mothers aren’t important, either. None of us are important.”

-Sheila Heti in Motherhood

 

In the years and months and weeks that led to the discovery of my fourth and only full-term pregnancy in France, I often thought about my friend Chelsie telling me that being with child gave her a glimpse of death. The slow degradation of physical ability. The slackening of mental strings, joints. The loss of balance, wardrobe, urinary control. The end, even if only momentarily, of professional relevance. The slow-clap farewell to sex appeal. The disappearance of your name in daily conversation: How’s the baby doing? In Chelsie’s story, complicated by the impending deadline of her dissertation, she often had the impression she was witnessing her own expiration, as life cycle and evolutionary matter displaced her, body and mind.

 

Chelsie’s words resonated deeply with me. Her frustrations (amid the joys) with being pregnant allowed me to imagine what I might also face if I chose to procreate. We were both invested in our careers, our writing, our independence. We had both fought quite surely to separate from the oppressive narratives of our family and home country. We had both lost, from time to time, our faith in our adopted country of France when we held it up—in social outings, romantic encounters, or political conversations—to our feminist ideals. We would both fear that having a child would mute us into Madonnas.

 

Chelsie lived her pregnancy in tandem with a buzzing world, one she wanted to participate in, one that had, because she had worked mercilessly to create it, a space for her. She did not want to fall away, lose her story, like so many mothers did, to society’s impulse to snuff out the flame of the person who becomes mother. Chelsie, the woman before baby, would continue to publish articles, run long distances, fuck for pleasure. If I ever find myself wanting to have a baby, I thought, I hope I have the tenacity of Chelsie.

 

In May 2020, several months into the COVID-19 pandemic and after a years-long battle to finish my own culminating text, I found out I was again pregnant, two months after a miscarriage, one year after an abortion. The health crisis was displacing us, body and mind. Countries had shut down, borders closed. Our collective tenacity was diminishing, being snuffed out by the overwhelming doom of soaring case numbers and indefinite global lockdown. I, who had just lost one pregnancy, paced my 27 square-meter apartment in the gall of something nascent.

 

—

 

Several years before, in September 2017, barely able to walk and after two weeks of hospitalization at Saint-Antoine, I felt like I was glimpsing my own death. For months, I had been trying to understand what was causing my ghostly breakdown: my legs were swollen and heavy, my tongue and throat ached, my hands were unable to unscrew things. I had hobbled all over Paris, to doctors and classes, and after each visit, I came back to my neighborhood, climbed the seven stories to my chambre de bonne, and collapsed on the pull-out sofa. It felt like my body had gone too far, as if it was showing signs of its own climate crisis, the long-time damage of a split self: my heart between France and the United States, my mind between two languages, my hours between French families who barely knew me and my writing life which barely heard from me.

 

In June of that year, my old roommate from New Orleans had come through Paris before heading to an artists’ residency. Later, she told me that she had thought I was shrinking, was scared for my life. Unable to and uninterested in eating more than yogurt, soup, water, and wine, I hadn’t realized that my easy-to-swallow diet had dwindled me down to one of my lowest weights. By that July, unable to and uninterested in continuing the underestimation of my worth by the French bourgeoisie, I decided to move in with my boyfriend. As I watched him carry my small collection of personal affairs down the seven flights and push them into an old yellow La Poste van, I felt a debilitating era of my life close. Even though my pains were still growing, I felt I was standing up for a new start in France and shipping myself to the 19th arrondissement, a place I wanted to be my own, and ours.

 

I did not immediately meet my independence. Practically upon arrival, my condition worsened, or maybe I let myself worsen. At night, my boyfriend rubbed my legs with tiger balm, but the pain was constant. Even when I ate turmeric, swallowed magnesium, took over-the-counter anti-inflammatories, my condition didn’t improve. My many visits to the doctor weren’t promising. They suggested I see a podiatrist, get orthopedic inserts. I was being treated for tendinitis as I lost mobility of my jaw, witnessed my legs, ankles to upper thighs, stiffen into relentless cramps.

 

When my boyfriend couldn’t handle seeing me suffer any longer, he rummaged through a cardboard box he used as a filing cabinet and produced a card. She’s good, he said, handing me the stiff, creamy little rectangle, but I haven’t seen her in a few years. When I got off at Voltaire, I walked a few blocks to find the inconspicuous, gold-plated plaque pasted on the entryway of a typical Haussmann building. I took the spiral staircase up several floors and was buzzed into a dimly lit space that smelled faintly of cigarettes. After the doctor heard my unwieldy story, after she suspiciously picked through my plastic sack of medical papers, she said, And this?! holding up a print-out of blood work. I looked at it. There, from months ago, a small, emboldened number reported a bit of inflammation in my blood. Why didn’t you go back for a follow-up? she asked. I stuttered to explain, but she wasn’t listening anymore. You need to go today, she told me as she tore a prescription from her notebook and handed it to me.

 

Hours later, while I was wasting away in bed, unable to keep a steady thought, my phone rang revealing an unidentified number. With all of my courage, I answered, expecting perhaps to hear the jumbled air that announces a telemarketer, to hear my doctor’s raspy voice: You must go to the ER immediately. I asked her to explain. You have an extremely high level of inflammation in your blood, she told me, almost furiously. Collect your results and go directly to Hôpital Saint-Antoine. I called my boyfriend and a cab, packed a small bag, left a WhatsApp message for my parents, and limped down our flight of stairs to meet my ride. As the driver descended the crepuscular streets of Belleville, I sat fixed on one hip, as my forearms and legs writhed. What was this invasive language taking over the speech of my body?

 

—

 

After many blood tests and a muscular biopsy on my lower left leg, I was finally diagnosed with a rare, idiopathic vasculitis condition: polyarteritis nodosa. In the three years that followed this diagnosis, I had many quarrels with my body. Already a dubious soul, I struggled to trust it again, to give it its due lead. I did not want to hear about the pains it was capable of. I felt arrested, by a tyrant or a younger sibling, someone who wanted to see how far they could push me. On top of that, the heavy and extended prednisone treatments I had to take, upon my hospital release in 2017 and again in 2019 after a relapse, sent me even further from my center, robbing me of sleep and inviting other self-loathing attitudes. As I watched my face bloat and redden with acne, my hips and thighs widen, I searched my past for triggers, told myself I could ride this out but could never tempt these demons again.

 

—

 

For so much unwanted that can happen to a body, I began to feel that this event, this pummeling, wrecking as it was, was also a bridge back to investing in my present tense, to ensuring my projects got back on track. I was sure I could be more decisive about my next steps. I made a promise to myself, the woman I wanted to be in France, in writing: I would show up for this life, for me.

 

Then, in 2019, still woefully fighting for a sense of normalcy, I found out I was pregnant. My mind spun out. My heart daggered. My life, presumed by others to be magical and luxurious due to the “status” of my location, was amuck, particularly financially so. Few people had taken the time to consider the truths of my reality; they only saw life in Paris, not the annual agony of renewing a visa. They did not think of the pressures of establishing oneself—emotionally, linguistically, financially, professionally—in another country. And they did not realize the years my writing had suffered because of the swirling chaos of organizing these vital, logistical issues. I was, in many ways, off-course, on an adventure I had launched without a map. My everyday sense of self—of direction, worth, and security—felt ever-vulnerable, and my independence, while at once the origin story for my start here, was now ever-increasingly inflicted upon me, by the glossy, non-particular communication from some of my closest family members and friends. Perhaps no one could imagine my life was so precarious because they couldn’t imagine anyone putting themselves through all of this uncertainty. Or perhaps the self-sovereignty that feminism has long instilled in me obscured, even from myself, my relative destitution.

 

When this pregnancy news came, I looked around at my life in Paris: four years in and still barely off its feet; at myself, 34 and barely published six years after the completion of my MFA; at my employment, essentially adjuncting, even if my short-term contracts took on a special-sounding French vocabulary. As I paced the tiny apartment that we could scarcely afford, I thought, How could I invite someone else, some innocent person, into this exhausting insecurity? Many things were gnawing in me. For two full days, I seemed to be unable to leave the lumpy springs of our second-hand couch. I fidgeted from side to side, held my body, in all of its current physical circumstances—signs of sickness and signs of health (a budding pregnancy). I felt once again under invasion. I worried about my mental health, thought about all the work I hadn’t finished yet. I couldn’t, I thought. I can’t. I talked with close girlfriends. I confided in my partner, told him all my greatest fears and hopes. He listened and confided in me. Then, we cried. Then, we argued. Then, we spent hours separate, not speaking, holding our own personal court sessions, each in one of our two rooms. Then, we met again, held each other on the lumpy springs of our second-hand couch. At night, we stared at the darkened ceiling over our bed unable to hush the ruckus of our thoughts. In the morning, we looked out our kitchen window at a courtyard full of running, laughing children and parents and held our breath, sighed. After 72 hours of this and a visit to the gynecologist to understand our options, we decided, hearts heaving, that we weren’t ready.

 

—

 

In the months that followed the abortion, I re-engaged with my promise: to find myself after sickness, find the woman I had lost in the mad pursuit of living abroad, find the woman I had lost in the mad pursuit of being a woman living anywhere. I was writing and teaching, trying to better manage my financial future. I tried to understand my marriage, how we could survive an abortion, how we could share our lives between two cultures and countries. I had always hoped love could be enough; I had often seen that it wasn’t. We were doing as fine as we could be doing and learning each other, more and more, through translation and mistranslation, in French and English. We began to take pleasure in our own personal brand of Franglais. From time to time, we would discuss our past, our choice. From time to time, we would discuss our future, the choice to revisit pregnancy. The wish for a family hovered, and we both seemed to feel we had a lot of work to do in order to be ready to meet that dream. I, personally, tried to sign myself up for the job of living as actively, physically and intellectually, as I could in my present tense. One of my first tasks was an investigation: what was my world of beliefs around motherhood?

 

Like a lot of women in their mid-30s, I answered the call to read Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. I told myself that it would help me tour through my loss, my doubts. It did, and I began to flip my own mental coin: shall I go on childless, or shall I tempt, as Heti calls it, “genetic relief?” I was particularly touched by her notion of “pursu[ing] failing biologically,” of disrupting the narrative expectations of my family and society, to “really be free.” Raised in a conservative, white community in the South, I had been indoctrinated to do my best to host “genteel” traits, and I was often disgusted by how persistent these social cues were in me. Throughout my 20’s, I had wanted so badly to be bad, to dishevel impulses towards purity, but the worst things I seemed to come up with were drinking and smoking heavily, becoming a poet, and dating “the wrong people.” As I transitioned into my 30’s and Paris, even though my stability was precarious, I felt newly accomplished. Though I was still annoyingly polite, socially passive, I had taken something under control. I had steered my life across the Atlantic and had begun, perhaps out of fatigue for my South, a new cultural study. I thought my immersion in French society would somehow override what felt provincial in me, what I feared was seen as provincial in me. I believed I was becoming worldly. Yet, I didn’t know if my worldliness could translate into maternity. Could I ever feel liberated enough to not commit the same sins of good intention my parents had?

 

I recommitted to my writing life, too, and, after feeling I had written a series of poems that investigated my own mother’s influence on my awareness of self, womanhood, sexuality, and social occupations, I began to notice a shifting in me, a sense of reprieve, a readiness. In my mind, I had wandered back far enough into the annals of family history to know that her insistence on me becoming a well-educated, well-spoken, securely employed, and promising marital candidate was an extension of the pressures to perform a womanhood she, too, had inherited, by way of love, by way of survival, by way of violence. I softened. I saw her aging and her body responding to the years of weight leveled on her by the American patriarchy. I loved her more and deeply and wanted to meet her somewhere, on a plane that was not accusatory but rather esteeming and ancestral. If I could bear it, if I could do it on my terms, I wanted to meet my mother through becoming a mother. Suddenly, I could imagine becoming a parent not as an act of obligation or obliteration, not as an act of accepting unwanted pregnancy, but as an act of affirmation, a choice for motherhood, in conscious and feminist evolution.

 

—

 

My fourth pregnancy began in lockdown and ended after curfew. From early May 2020 to February 1, 2021, I did most of my swelling indoors. My husband, a drummer and one of the only people who truly saw me balloon, played it romantic. You contain two heartbeats! For him, it was a rhythmic phenomenon. I, too, found it miraculous. Yet, throughout the lockdown months, I began to struggle with the joy of pregnancy. My physical presence, like all of ours, had been reduced, rendered hazy. All of the work I’d done before becoming pregnant felt remote, attached to another world. Of course, I hadn’t always been sure I wanted a child, but, as a menstruating person, I had grown up with the vivid awareness that a pregnancy could always happen. Because of that, in sometimes fear and in sometimes wonder, I had already imagined and inserted a pregnant version of my body into my manège of daily life appearances: Here I hold my bump in front of a classroom of students while I discuss a very intriguing subject. Here I waddle through the crowds at République to meet my friends for happy hour. There I refuse wine and order a Perrier. Here I let a family member touch my bump and know the warmth of their hand, their smile. There I go with my partner to the doctor’s office. Here I wade through racks and racks of musky, used clothes to find some do-able pregnancy pieces because I am on a budget and concerned about the environment. Here I sit in a café working my heart out in anticipation of not having me-time in a few months.

 

Almost none of these moments happened for me. Of course, one does not choose a pregnancy for the parade of the bump, but one also does not consider being so alone with a growing belly, through the questions, symptoms, and preparation of bringing in new life. Instead, I spent months and months in the unnerving reflexivity of the home. With borders closed, I felt even farther away from my mother and family. In these moments, I found it hard to reconnect with my wish for an ancestral plane and a “motherhood in conscious and feminist evolution.” What was conscious and evolutive about this? Wasn’t COVID-19 a sign from the natural world that we had gone too far?

 

On top of that, some of the realities, just like Chelsie had told me, of being pregnant brought about a lot of fatalistic feelings. I began to fear that being with child, that becoming a mother, that taking up the archaic role of child-rearing would disqualify me from my community, would make me disappear as a feminist. How could I be a feminist if I couldn’t support other women writers at events that began at 8 pm? Would a tweet from my nursing pillow suffice? How could I be a feminist if I didn’t have time to write my poems that spoke of my personal politics of being a woman? Would the old work still have power? When would new work come? What would be the new work, motherhood poems? How could I be a feminist if all my money was going to childcare and diapers instead of to funds helping others fight for reproductive rights? Would two euros help? Would a tweet suffice? How could I be a feminist if I spent many nights waiting for my partner, a man, to come home to give me a break? I was going to fulfill, my worst thoughts told me, the roles so written into societal expectations that, even if they were too much, even if they didn’t allow me to reclaim my personhood, I would still be seen as doing well. My mind preyed on these thoughts while I waited on my students to appear in our Zoom classroom, while I did my Kegel exercises, while I walked, masked, to the grocery store before 6 pm to quench a craving.

 

—

 

In my experience, I have found it true that in the loss of pregnancy, in the case of abortion and miscarriage, that you do replay the unlived story, you do revisit the memory of the unborn. I’ve also found that you relive the conversations, had with self and with partners, around these losses. They return with brilliance, surely painful, to illuminate issues at hand. I have also found that in the loss of pregnancy, you revisit every brush with fear of pregnancy you’ve ever had.

 

In one instance, preceding my meeting my now-husband, I was having sex with a man I’d been seeing for six months. When he came inside of me without asking and told me after, he said, Sorry, I got caught up, but you can take the morning-after pill, right? The sheer disregard for the consequences, the implication that I would myself go to the pharmacy, ask for the pill, take its installments completely baffled me and probably counts for one of the several reasons we split up not long after. His belief, one he shares with a good majority, was that I could skip through this, that I could compromise my body, mind, hours, days, like menstruating people have been expected to do for centuries. To this day, I still pass by that pharmacy and remember my eyes crusted with morning tears, my voice swollen with a shame that reached back for all of my maternal ancestors. When I think of this story and the many stories in which my life ran close to unwanted pregnancy, when I think of the many stories (which come down to literal hours of my day taken away) in which I’ve had to construct my entire life around ensuring I don’t find myself in the situation of unwanted pregnancy, and when I think about how little some people have to think about this, I want to scream. When I think about the fortune of being in France, where my choice is respected, protected, and where it is met with respect from informative medical professionals, I want to cry.

 

—

 

Choosing, very decisively, to try for a child is one of the most beautiful, spiritual moments of realization I’ve had in my life. As wonderfully empowering as my decision to go to graduate school, to move to Paris, to marry my husband, to write my book. Certainly, I don’t believe that every menstruating or pregnant person must pass through these steps, but I do celebrate and fight for our reproductive right of choice, the right to bodily autonomy.

 

The pandemic muted us all and, in some ways, forced us to consider the spaces the overlooked and under-seen have occupied. In the intense months of our 2020 lockdown, when I looked out at the lot of us in Paris, masked, folding in on ourselves, scoping out grocery and pharmacy lines to see if we could leave a proper one-meter distance so as not to invite unwanted attention, averting our gazes if someone coughed or aggressively approached us, I realized that the pandemic was asking everyone to navigate the world as a woman has to, with dire caution.

 

—

 

On a mid-November day last year, in between Zoom class sessions, I went outside to find lunch. Sure the baby or some other alacritous force would guide me, I stepped out onto our rue Mélingue. Barely 200 meters from my front door, I stopped and peered into a small, dimly lit Turkish restaurant. I had noticed it before, fancied it almost kin to me: a bit too eager, sometimes forlorn, and not quite ready to survive the bodacious currents of the 19th arrondissement’s boboïsation. My bump caught the midday light and the eyes of the owner.

 

“Le moussaka est fait maison, chaque jour. Très bon,” he walked up to tell me. “Cela vient avec une petite salade à côté.” I stood on his miniature outdoor terrace, next to the wobbly chalkboard menu, and nodded. “Bon, j’en prendrai,” I’ll take it, I heard myself say, as I tightened the sash of my robe coat just under my breasts. Before turning back inside to relay my order, he pulled a chair to the back of my knees. My legs flinched in reflex, and I, whoosh, fell to its vinyl pad.

 

In retrospect, this episode, an unspoken and barely decipherable acknowledgment of “my state,” was how I could count myself seen, after six months of precautionary isolation, as a pregnant person. As I sat there on display on rue de Belleville, I saw familiar faces that didn’t see me. We had been bound to the same circuit since March 2020, but we had not grown friendlier, not really. On this little deck, I waited for my meal and thought of my students, those who would never inspect me as I waddled by them in a heated lecture or with their test papers. I thought of all of us being screen-bound, our endangered vitality. I thought of Chelsie’s glimpse of death, my glimpse of death. I thought of the glimpse of death in a world health crisis. I thought of returning to sit in my partner’s ancestor’s chair as I tried to animate social justice subjects in front of 20 blinking faces from the tiny apartment we were converting into a three-person space. I thought of my physical conversion into a two-person body. As I watched the slow pandemic traffic float by, the sun warmed my cheeks and gave my scarf static charge. I felt like I never wanted to leave this spot where I could temporarily forget the ever-multiplying emotional workloads. I adjusted the layers of my ensemble to straighten the elastic bib of my pregnancy jeans. I was basking in my intellectual life, in hopes for my baby, in the decisions that had brought us here. Here I was a woman, in a mask and coat, containing two heartbeats, under an autumn sun, as my body and choice took up an entire little terrace in Paris.

 

 

 

 

Carrie Chappell is the author of Loving Tallulah Bankhead (forthcoming from Paris Heretics, 2022) and Quarantine Daybook (Bottlecap Press 2021). Her essays have previously appeared in DIAGRAM, Fanzine, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, The Rupture, and Xavier Review. Though originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she now lives in Paris, France.