CELEBRITIES

I have an insatiable appetite for celebrity news and commentary. Which is why it was unsurprising that the internet attention-direction robots served me an article this morning about Rihanna’s pregnancy redefining maternity style. This is as close as I will probably ever get to discussing current events here. And also, HELL YES.

What I loved about this story was the honoring of two Black women (Rihanna and Beyonce) who decided that their pregnancies would be a public celebration – both of their motherhood AND their self-expression. There’s a discussion in the article about how visibility of pregnant and mothering bodies has become more accepted but they are still expected to be hidden under clothing, and it fits into a larger cultural conversation about how women, when they become mothers, are expected to give up so much of themselves – their bodies, their sexuality, their lives, their individuality – from the moment they become mothers. My sister once pointed out to me that this is a type of privilege, to be able to have a life that feels like it would be given up, and it is a privilege to be able to keep those parts of yourself while being a mother. In the same breath, as we aspire to have those privileges, I’ve listened to people minimize the accomplishments of mothers who have additional help and support (to be clear: parents deserve more support, period). The bottom line is there are still so many unwritten rules and judgements around how we expect mothers to behave. Sacrifice, martyrdom, and purity take up an enormous part of that story.

And. It feels audacious to talk about all of this when I am not a mother.

When I saw the photos of Rihanna’s pregnancy outfits, my very first reaction was appreciation, and immediately after came the conditioning, a flood of (adult) voices from my past. I could hear distinctly their disgust at her belly’s visibility, shaming her overt sexuality, her choice to reveal her body. These are the same voices that expressed distress and discomfort with my body – and a lot of other types of bodies – and at the same time convinced me that I would be responsible for any attention I attracted if I dressed immodestly. There is a dissonance, impossible to reconcile, to being told that your body is wrong and desirable at the same time – it’s a paradox that might be funny if it wasn’t shaming in both directions. And that tension was not only directed toward my body, but also my relationships and sexuality and, as I got older, the expectation of getting pregnant.

I’ve reached the magic age where people have stopped asking if we’re going to have kids. We’ve been married for 10 years, together for almost 20, and I still don’t know the answer to that question. I also understand the curiosity, even when it’s not socially acceptable to ask. I’ve read dozens of personal essays about why people chose to have kids or decided not to, always hoping to find a mirror in one of them, never finding an answer that swayed me one way or the other. I don’t feel like I owe anyone an explanation, and I also feel like this choice – and the importance of being able to choose – is part of my story that I want to share.

Underneath all of my reasons for not wanting kids (yet – there’s still room for that to change in the future), at first, was a repulsion with my body. Disgust and repulsion have an energy of moving away from the repelling object, and when it’s your own body, it’s impossible to get far enough away from yourself. This type of aversion is the opposite of curiosity and shuts down the impulse to discover and explore, which makes disgust an effective method of control. The self-hatred I lived with – for having a body that didn’t fit into an approved mold unless I starved myself, for even wanting to fit the mold as badly as I did, and because my body internally wasn’t working like it was supposed to (not shocking at all, given the starvation and some genetics), all hidden to the world under a cheerful exterior – convinced me I would be a terrible mother. Somehow I had a sense that if I couldn’t figure out how my body worked, or what it needed – how was I going to find the capacity to care for myself and another human? I don’t think that past version of myself was wrong, and I’m grateful she was loud. She would have figured it out, but there’s also a chance she would have continued a cycle of inherited shame. What I didn’t know then was that the self-disgust and complete inability to regulate that I was experiencing had a trigger: unhealed trauma. My explosive emotions, mood swings, high stress levels, anxiety, body dysmorphia, dieting and restrictive eating, overwork, and people-pleasing were/are all symptoms of a lack of real self-care due to unresolved trauma.

I have no regrets about taking the time to begin healing before making a choice about having kids. (And there is no judgement of anyone who chose a different path – whenever you find your way to healing, may you have the space and support that you need.) But now that I’m starting to feel like I have ownership of my life and my desires and something like appreciation for my body, there is a fear of losing it all over again if I choose motherhood. There’s the fear of having to give up work, my creative space, the autonomy I’m building into my life. This fear seems specific to women (and people who identify as women); for instance, my male spouse does not have this same fear of losing himself in fatherhood. Instead of shedding parts of himself, he just adds an identity if we have kids, without any expectation of giving up another one or that it will be the most interesting thing about him. 

This is why seeing visible women who are not giving up any parts of themselves while being and becoming mothers – and being able to appreciate this about them – feels hopeful. I want the freedom to cultivate an identity instead of or in addition to motherhood to be something that is not just for women with a certain type of monetary privilege, but to be accessible to all of us, while acknowledging that there is a long way to go, a lot of systemic support to build and investigation of our own stories about the sacrifices required of parents. Above all, I admire women who are painting a full picture of womanhood, one that does not play into the shaming of women or mothers (and their bodies and their choices) but instead embraces that all women – regardless of whether they are mothers or not – have a right to identities all of their own.