CW: pregnancy, medical trauma
Who has not seen flashing in their social media feeds the latest pregnancy portraits from acquaintances or celebrities? The bump selfie, the time lapse video, maybe a glamorous photo shoot in those last months when walking seems impossible. If staged in a studio, there are the ubiquitous flowers and garlands or sumptuously draped fabrics. If taken in a natural setting, the options include a grassy field or a tree-surrounded meadow. Non-celebrity parents often place baby shoes on top of the giant bump or spell out the estimated due date with chalk or toy blocks.
Or perhaps the couple, in an effort to be subversive, have opted to parody the genre with an announcement accompanied by a picture of the soon-to-be mom slumped over the toilet bowl from morning sickness or a witty pun connected to food, baking, or the word “pop” and all its idiomatic expressions.
It’s easy to forget amid the commercialization and pervasiveness of these pictures that it was only in 1991 when Demi Moore’s nude pregnancy portrait by Annie Leibovitz revolutionized the way we publicly represent expecting mothers. At the time, newsstands hid the Vanity Fair cover as if it were a pornography magazine. A nude pregnant body, even one as celebrity-perfect as Demi Moore’s, was considered obscene, something to cover up.
Much has changed in the past three decades, including in 2017 when Beyoncé electrified celebrity news and social media with her own pregnancy portraits created with artist Awol Erizku. The iconic image (the most liked of 2017) shows Beyoncé veiled and kneeling under an archway of roses. It simultaneously solidified and revamped pregnant bodies as beautiful, confident, and sexy.
Whether it’s celebrity portraits or everywoman pictures flashing in my feed, they are a ritual of modern pregnancy and, while produced en masse, they also serve as a powerful means for women to celebrate their bodies, sexuality, and familial love. For Black and Latina women, these images are a counternarrative to contemporary and historical racist stereotypes that have denied, excluded, shamed, and misrepresented the experiences of motherhood from women of color.
One essential element that defines this genre is the triumphant bliss each image strives to create. However, there is another implication, about the stories we allow women to tell, about how we limit and confine those stories to a prescription: in public, pregnancy equals joy and hope. But what if, contrary to every pregnancy picture, image, and representation you’ve ever seen, your pregnancy brings pain, fear, shame, or grief?
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In 2015, at twenty-two weeks pregnant with my second son, the maternal medicine specialist overseeing my third ultrasound revealed that he had seen several fetal abnormalities on my son’s wrists, hands, fingers, feet, and chin. The genetics counselor who accompanied him explained that these findings could indicate a rare but potentially lethal genetic disorder, Trisomy 18. Two weeks later, when the amniocentesis revealed my son’s chromosomes to be the typical thirteen pairs, the next possibility was a musculo-skeletal disease called Arthrogryposis, which in turn is connected to over 300 different medical conditions and syndromes. My husband and I went to follow-up appointments and ultrasounds for monitoring, but the uncertainty spread like fractals of tree branches. Until our son was born, developed, and fully genetically tested, we would not know the extent of his medical complications or disabilities.
For the remainder of my pregnancy, I made obsessive Google searches and read parent blogs, message boards, and medical articles. Everyday after work, I went home to hide under the bed covers and cry. Emotionally and physically exhausted, I would take a shower, sometimes two, then say a meditative rosary on a recliner chair, often still hot and naked from the shower. I rubbed oil on my belly not for any attempt at alleviating stretch marks (mine have existed since high school), but because in that twenty-minute refuge of massage and prayer, I felt connected to my son. I didn’t speak about the depression, fear, and grief I felt. I was ashamed of these feelings because they seemed antithetical to all my previous conceptions of maternity. How could I be grieving when my son was alive and kicking inside me? I thought these negative emotions signaled that I didn’t love my son or that my body, and therefore I, had failed.
With my first pregnancy, I loved being pregnant. I was and still am a fat woman and I revelled in getting bigger. My libido and changing body were wonderfully hypersensitive. As a teacher, my students were equally excited about the baby, and I worked until a week before the due date.
In contrast, during my second pregnancy, I comfort ate burgers, mint cookies, and artichoke jalapeño dip. When it came time for my glucose-screening, my levels measured just below a gestational diabetes diagnosis, and my OB-GYN asked me to be more mindful of my eating habits. Physically I grew big, but I was ashamed of it. Emotionally I shrank from depression, isolating myself from friends, family, and work. My students were excited about the baby, but I felt ashamed and began maternity leave a month before the estimated due date, even though it was within my legal rights.
I yearned to reclaim my pregnancy which led me to a series of twelve guided birth art activities from Pam England’s book Birthing From Within, exploring fears, fantasies, conceptions and misconceptions about pregnancy and birth inherited from one’s culture or the media. England emphasized that birth art wasn’t planned or composed, and it didn’t need to be pretty. It wasn’t Art with a capital “A.” This reminder was an invitation for me, an art lover with drawing skills that maxed out at squares and circles.
I took out my spiral notebook journal and began by drawing my birth as a geographical feature. This second pregnancy had so many medical unknowns. Fantasy felt safe, playful, and allowed me to bypass my inner censor and cynic.
Given the detail and heavy coloring, I must have started from that central image: an unknown, spiraling vortex. At the entrance to this labor-cave, I drew myself crawling on hands and knees. Inside the spiral are plus signs which I labelled the next day as affirmations. Joining me in this journey are three companions: my husband, our two-year-old, and our doula, birthbag at the ready, exclaiming, “Aleyluia!” (it’s also ok to be a horrible speller when making birth art). At the exit of the cave, I stand and hold our new baby.
With a sense of playfulness I continued, drawing snippets of details that I remembered had helped during my first son’s birth. On an exercise ball, hunched over the side of a table, in a bath (technically I used the shower a lot), my husband close by. On hands and knees (again) with lines representing breath. Arrows of breath entering my mouth and encircling my son, already head down, with a spiky head of hair.
I moved quickly through the sketches, focusing on easy details: hands, hair, body position. More importantly, I was having fun. Accessing fantasy and recalling my first birth made me feel confident and expansive.
I moved to another suggested activity England calls “Being Pregnant.” It seemed like such an innocuous question: what is it like for you to be pregnant? I made my first perfunctory sketch.
I have a circle head with long hair falling down the back, a rectangle for a body, two ovals for feet. I do not have arms or hands, an interesting omission since hands and arms featured so prominently in my fantasies. My pregnant belly is a huge balloon, larger than my actual self-representation, and extends in front of me. The oval tangentially connects to my body and is empty.
The doodle touched the surface of something. I knew there was more. Without hesitating, my hand jumped down the page and created a second pregnancy portrait, my largest, most detailed picture yet.
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Two or three years later, I was flipping through a Frida Kahlo art book I had borrowed from the library. Seeing Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, startled me. Kahlo painted this image after experiencing a miscarriage in Detroit. In the painting, she lies naked on the blood-stained hospital bed. Six objects, attached to Kahlo via red string resembling umbilical cords, converge into her hand. These objects include a medical model of a female abdomen, a male fetus, a snail, a pelvic bone, a purple orchid, and a steel autoclave. Though I hadn’t thought about my pregnancy self-portrait, seeing Kahlo’s painting, my body remembered and felt tugged in multiple directions.
Unconsciously I must have channeled Kahlo’s imagery, but I cannot remember when I first saw this famous painting. For me, La Frida’s paintings that depict pregnancy losses are an adamant exploration of what remains mostly unspeakable, feelings we don’t associate with pregnancy: horror, grief, pain, deep sadness for both physical and psychological losses. Kahlo’s imagery embraces paradox—gory and beautiful, life-like and surreal. In a medicalized life, the omnipresence of doctors, medicines, recovery beds, medical procedures, and ongoing treatments often feels dehumanizing, but Kahlo’s work is an emphatic insistence of keeping her sense of personal agency.
Where else can we find representations of pregnancy that are not the elaborate, glowing, Madonna-esque images we have come to expect and judge ourselves by? More than seven years after my pregnancy, I still seek them out as if panning for gold, and they are, it seems, just as rare, unless you know how to find them.
A 2018 museum exhibit called Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985 featured the 1978 lithograph Pregnant Woman in a Ball of Yarn by Chicana artist Barbara Carrasco. According to the exhibit’s notes, in 1990, this image was considered offensive by some curators and almost censored from being included in another show, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, the first major exhibition of Chicano art in the U.S. In Carrasco’s work, a nude, very pregnant woman is entrapped in a ball of yarn, strings covering her eyes, mouth, arms and hands. The loose end comes off the prison of yarn into a crocheted baby bootie. A crochet hook (a common tool used in self-induced abortions) rests next to the bootie and ball of yarn, angled suggestively towards the tied-up woman.
England’s book included a photo of “Smocked Figure” from Judy Chicago’s Birth Project created from 1980-85. In this artwork, we see the deceptively simple embroidered outline of a pregnant woman in rainbow-variegated thread. Unlike many pregnancy images, it’s not the massive belly that draws my attention, but the woman’s slumped posture, the delineated arms, and the detailed hands and fingers covering her face as if she is sobbing.
In September 2020, Chrissy Teigan shared a portrait via Instagram shortly after the loss, at twenty weeks pregnant, of her son, Jack. (In 2022, Teigan shared that she had had a life-saving abortion). In the realm of celebrity maternity pictures, Teigan’s photo is as revolutionary as Moore’s, as iconoclastic as Beyonce’s, and Teigan faced tremendous backlash and censorship hellbent on rebuking a woman, yet again, to keep her body and what happens to her body private.
To the best of my knowledge, unless you include women’s private photo albums or personal social media feeds, there is no Madonna with Gestational Diabetes, Madonna of the Amniocentesis, or Madonna of the IV Tower and Labor and Delivery Room. I feel kinship with these images that portray the complexities of being pregnant. They challenge the demands for silence and censorship around experiences that do not follow the prescribed, imposed narrative of a joyful and celebratory pregnancy. These images revolve around loss, distress, powerlessness, a beauty often called grotesque, and, despite all its astonishing advances, a medical system that sometimes leaves more questions than answers.
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When I made my second “Being Pregnant” sketch, I was frightened by what had come out. How was this a picture of being pregnant? The tears had more definition than my dot-eyes. Seven hooks grab me, and at the end of each are various worries on my mind—selling our house; weekend open houses; buying a new one; my classroom with desks in groups of four; the amniocentesis experience and that needle; my Virgin Mary meditations; sciatica leg pain; my two-year old with wild, unkempt hair. Above my head is a thought bubble with question marks and dismembered body parts—hands, feet, brain, profile, chin. It wasn’t until years later that I saw the faintest wisp of a circle in my stomach, the only reference to physically being pregnant. Like the first self portrait, pregnancy was an afterthought, a tangent. I was an obese, depressed, scared pregnant woman, the antithesis of the triumphant pregnant goddess images we perpetually produce, consume, and measure ourselves by.
The next day, I reflected on the artwork with England’s “Gentle Exploration Process.” I labeled symbols and details, feelings and descriptions. I tried to avoid self-critique and focused on curiosity and compassion. The last question challenged me: “Is there more?”
For months, disconnect and depression had been the story of my pregnancy. I couldn’t imagine more. Instead of a small doodle in my journal, I took a blank printer page and found a pen with green ink. “Draw the next image in the story,” England prompts. “Is there more?” I drew a third self-portrait of “Being Pregnant.”
My belly is huge. My hips are huge. My breasts are huge with prominent veins, and drip colostrum (my doula had encouraged me to explore my body by gently squeezing my nipples to secrete colostrum.) My hands (absent in the first self-portrait, held up in surrender in the second) are active, rubbing circles, bonding with my son through psychic and physical touch.
All three self-portraits told the story of my pregnancy. Working visually and symbolically, the birth art was not only facing my self-doubts and trauma, but physically drawing its shape, delineating its form, and finally claiming all of it as integral to the story. This is not to say that my perinatal depression and anxiety subsided, but making the birth art helped me find a sense of agency. In a fragmented, chaotic pregnancy, the process helped me begin to create wholeness out of the disparate/desperate pieces.
Pregnancy is beautiful. It is also complicated and unromantic, painful and ugly. I enjoy seeing my friends and social media acquaintances celebrate their changing bodies. At the same time, among my friends and acquaintances who want or have children, the majority have experienced a range of pregnancy-related grief that includes abortion(s), miscarriage(s), stillbirths, neonatal death, serious pregnancy complications, fetal abnormalities, infertility, and anxiety about bringing a baby into a violent, xenophobic world on the brink of climate catastrophe. I hear their stories through one-on-one conversations or see their annual commemorations for the short lives of their children on social media feeds. From this censorship, it’s as if the emotional complexities of motherhood exist as folk stories passed on by word of mouth in private, intimate conversations. These are not the stories captured in our iconography portraying pregnancy, but they represent a small sample of how much has been kept silent, kept private, kept festering in women’s hearts.
Sarah Dalton is a Latina writer, editor, and teacher. She is an alumna of VONA, Macondo, AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship, and the MFA program at San José State. Her nonfiction has appeared in Crab Creek Review, [pank], MUTHA Magazine, Reed, and River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things.” Originally from the San Francisco East Bay, she’s finding roots in the Pacific Northwest where she teaches at Hugo House and is a Fiction Editor with Literary Mama.
Twitter/IG: sdaltonwrites
Photo by: Freestocks