A certain divinity is instantly felt the moment those two pink lines appear on the home pregnancy test. It is a joy I will never be able to put into words, and I don’t think I want to. It is a sacred joy that I think I want to keep to myself. Something shifts internally, starting with your physical body of course, but the mind and spirit don’t take long to follow.
As beautiful as that first moment is, and man is it breathtaking when you realize the seed of a human life is slowly growing inside of you and you rush to tell your husband who’s already standing by the bathroom door studying your reaction only to then match your wide smile and warm tears with his own, it didn’t take long for it to get ugly for me. I know that associating ugly with pregnancy is a bit of a taboo, as I’ve come to realize many other things are, but I’m not about to sugarcoat my experience for anybody’s comfort.
I want to tell you what quickly followed my initial excitement. A few days after taking my home pregnancy test, I went to see an obstetrician. I had taken my time to research and read the reviews and experiences of my fellow women before choosing what turns out to be the best doctor I was blessed with. Being in that waiting room is still a blurry moment, I was overwhelmed with anxiety. I may have had an anxiety attack as I awaited my turn. All the bad things that I’ve ever read about pregnancy and bodies and babies came rushing. Something could be wrong with my body is the thought that kept bombarding me. I kept swatting the many negative thoughts off my brain like hungry mosquitoes and tried to focus on what was supposed to be a joyous occasion. And it was! The moment I saw that small gray grain in a vast black hole (my uterus), something happened. I couldn’t contain my laughter, tears and smile. I was six weeks pregnant and all we could see was the smallest little grain that you had to squint to actually make out. I turned to my husband who had caught my eye and smiled reassuringly. He had known. He felt my fears, without me uttering one word.
Then came what I now refer to as “The Great Punishment of 2023.” To this day, I don’t know what I was being punished for, but it sure felt like I was. Maybe for being happy? Or past life karma? Either way. It started with my physical body completely forsaking me. I no longer could keep any type of solid food down. You would think “that’s alright, you can always have soup.” I couldn’t keep my water down. My doctor had to prescribe me medication so I don’t get dehydrated. With the lack of food and water in my system for three months, my energy levels surely plummeted to the point where I couldn’t dream of leaving my bed let alone get my head up off the pillow. For 92 days, my life was flashing before my eyes as I watched the days pass me in what I thought was my deathbed. I was nauseous, dizzy and weak every waking second and all I dreamed of every single day was the sweet release of nighttime where I could finally sleep and forget about my endless suffering. With no food in my system, I could no longer use the restroom. This might be disgusting to you, but this was my reality. Nothing came out of that end but everything and sometimes nothing but my stomach lining came out of the end located in my face. I could go on and on about how sickly I felt during that time but what was most frightening to me was the state of my mental health.
I thought I had said goodbye to suicidal ideation a long time ago. Well not to the concept of it, but I assumed I had the necessary tools to face it head on now. I was dead wrong! Or maybe I was right but there’s something far greater and stronger than any tool I might’ve thought I had in my toolbox, it’s called hormones. HCG or human chorionic gonadotropin is a chemical created by trophoblast tissue, tissue typically found in early embryos and which will eventually be part of the placenta. Or to simplify it, it is the hormone that accompanies you from the moment you get pregnant. Or to simplify it even further, it is the monster that has haunted me and made me want to get into the bathtub and drown myself. Every day when I first opened my eyes, my first thought would scare me and send shivers down my spine: “It would be so much easier if I just did it.” I was convinced that my life was over, that somehow my fetus, the love of my life, was rejecting my body. “Nobody loved or cared for me and everyone would be better off without me” being on a loop from dusk till dawn. I won’t go into details of my obsessive scary thoughts because they all look the same. And guess what? They’re not important. But no matter how much I try to explain my fears at the time, I will never be able to put it into words and the only way I can describe it is: I was afraid of being left alone because I wasn’t sure of what I was capable of.
Looking back, I forgive myself for those thoughts. You starve a woman who’s growing a human life inside of her for three months straight and you get a suicidal depressed zombie who doesn’t know which day it is.
And I googled, I purchased books, I asked previously pregnant people, I inquired everywhere I could but nothing was out there except for the physical symptoms. The list of things I was to be aware of physically was extensive. Everything was out there for me to understand - not that it made what I was going through any easier. But I still wonder why we can’t talk about what women with mental illnesses go through during the early stages of pregnancy except for umbrella terms such as “depression.” This word that seems to be in every article will never encompass the fear, the loneliness, and the absolute terror of wanting to end your life and that of the one you waited for. Depression will never encompass the shell of a human being, of your former self, you become for days that don’t seem to end. And I wish nobody sugarcoated my struggles at the time because to me it stills feel like that term sugarcoated what I was going through.
So yes, I might be writing this for myself first, but I sure as hell am writing it for every single woman who might go through this very dark period with no resources thinking that they’re not normal or crazy for feeling the way I felt. I’m here to tell you, you’re not! Read my words and know that your experience is as normal as can be. Of course, nothing about the experience of being pregnant is normal, and I don’t even know if I would like us to use the term “normal” to describe this miraculous experience and despite everything, I still think it is. It is certainly valid and it fucking matters no matter the lack of resources out there.
I think this is what first drawn me to your newsletter, Jihene. You write these mental illnesses in a way that is not surface level. And I perfectly understand when you said saying "depression" even feels like a sugarcoat to everything you had to deal with. Often my thoughts also scare me, and saying that feels like a mere generalization too. I couldn't even begin to imagine how it must feel like now that you're having a baby. But I'm proud of you not just for baring it all, but also for bearing it all. xx