Pregnancy is a transformative experience that changes not only your body and your life trajectory, but how society views your value as a woman. And, Lyz Lenz points out in her new book Belabored, it changes your hair, your weight, food preferences, how you walk, how you sleep and the person you become.
The book is broken into the ‘four’ trimesters of pregnancy, the first three when the fetus is developing into a baby, and the fourth, when both parents and baby are adjusting to life outside the womb. Each chapter tackles issues inherent to these different stages of development. The chapters open with an aspect of Lenz’s personal story and expand into more general themes of, for example, conception in the first trimester section, to a chapter on miracles in the third trimester section.
Within this structure the book entertains with an irreverent tone. In the chapter on Miscarriage, Lenz laments the pseudo science around the ‘best” parenting practices in a way that particularly hit home for me. As a writer and full time single mother, Lenz is with her young kids at the park and at the same time, attending to email on her phone. She, “overheard a mother say to her friend how smartphones are making us bad parents. I wanted to throw my phone at her head and remind her that Ma Ingalls lost Carrie in a field while she did laundry by hand.”
Lenz parses the extenuating political, cultural and religious beliefs that drive social expectations of motherhood, highlighting how many of these expectations are in conflict with each other; each expectation can only be satisfied by sacrificing another, ensuring that mother’s will always be in the wrong.
Women should recuperate after nine months of dramatic physical transformation, capped off by delivering a baby the size of a watermelon out of a hole the diameter of a small grapefruit. But paid leave is mostly a dream in the US, despite the academic studies that link it to decreased rates of infant death and lower rates of post partum depression. And unpaid leave is not a financially viable option for many families. Women are often made to feel responsible for miscarriage (and in many states are held responsible as a consequence of ‘fetal personhood’ laws), yet miscarriage is extremely common and it’s cause is poorly understood. As the fashion dictates, breast feeding has been marketed as the best way to nourish a growing baby, but heaven forbid that crucial act of providing sustenance for the baby take place in any public space.
She pays attention to the fact that both the experience and power of social perspective hits women of different racial and ethnic groups differently. For example, even as infant mortality rates are currently dropping, maternal mortality is on the rise, and black women face a shockingly higher rate of dying than their white counterparts.
It is a well told, well researched and regrettably relatable story.