Expecting

By Chitra Ramaswamy

From the author of a Guardian memoir of the year 2022

"A cartoon fried egg. An eye. The tiniest of black holes. It needed a professional eye to be seen, but once pointed out it was undeniable. My own little Big Bang. The beginning of it all."

When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant for the first time, she longed to read something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of the overwhelming, thrilling, and often misrepresented experience she was embarking on. She couldn’t find one.

So, she wrote Expecting.

Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of gestation and birth, Ramaswamy takes the reader on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy. Childbearing and childbirth are experiences defined both by the measurable monthly changes to one's life and body, and by those immeasurable, often obscured and neglected changes in perspective that are accessed through metaphor, art, and emotion.

Ramaswamy bears witness to the experience of pregnancy in an intimate yet expansive book of lyrical essays, paying tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Saraband
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781916812291

Chitra Ramaswamy

Chitra Ramaswamy is an award-winning author and journalist. Her debut book won the Best First Book of the Year prize in Scotland’s National Book Awards and was nominated for the Polari Prize for books by LGBTQ+ writers. Her most recent book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship,  won Scotland’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message From The Skies and recently completed a commission from the Alasdair Gray Archive. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she is from London and lives in Edinburgh with her partner, two children, and rescue dog. 

Book preview

Introduction

Afterbirth

When my son was a few weeks old I started writing my first book. This book. My milk came in and, finally, so did the words. I started to write, as Hélène Cixous put it, in the white ink of my milk. Neither came easy at first, but a decade on I wonder if the difficulty, the frustration, the tenderness, and the damn constraints were what birthed the book. That I wrote not in spite of the pram in the hall, but because of it.

Those early weeks of motherhood unfold in another, you might say, mothertime. The first six weeks, when I overcame the tyranny of the blank page (and established breastfeeding!), even have a name. An inadequate one, like so many of the words that issue from pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. They are known as the fourth trimester, as though it were the last stage of pregnancy and not the first of life.

So. There was this baby. The same one, I had to keep reminding myself in the hospital as I was confronted with the belly still mountaining before me, who roiled in there for nine months. Give or take. Because it’s not actually true – or convenient if you happen to be embarking on a book of nine essays charting the nine months of pregnancy – that a pregnancy invariably takes nine months. Many are more like ten. Mine included.

Anyway. Back to the baby. Here he was with his elegant fingers, wise face, and my father’s nose, and yet still, in so many ways, still there, roiling in my womb. He was an internal organ that I carried around on my soft, leaking, also new person. He was an independent creature with his own bodily functions, which were produced by mine. He was a person, already. There he lay, arms and legs of his sleep suit trailing off his mini-limbs, snuffling on his back at the foot of the Moses basket. Sorry… Moses basket?! Yes. The bed where the baby (theoretically) sleeps is still, in the culture in which I gave birth, named after the Old Testament story of Moses, the infant left by his mother (in an act of protection not abandonment) in a wicker basket amongst the bulrushes of the River Nile. The language given to you by history when you are handed the baby is not just inadequate, it is often archaic. And without thinking much at all about it, I used it. I put the baby in the Moses basket. (Then, as history also dictates, he started crying so I took him out again.)

At the same time changes were taking place in another impenetrable chamber of my body. My mind. Throughout my pregnancy I had been thinking about this book I might write. Which, in itself, was typical. Throughout my life I have carried ideas for books around with me like others carry house keys, but none had amounted to actual books. This one was different. To use a pregnancy term, it was viable. And so, for the rest of my pregnancy, this book of curious, digressive essays grew in my mind in tandem with the foetus fattening in my belly. I couldn’t write it, no, I was too busy with its subject, but I did start to read.

What did I find? At first, very little. And as for books telling the stories of black, brown, and queer expectant and mothering bodies – which is to say, mine – even less. There was no Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts nor Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk. No Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers, Claire Kilroy’s Soldier, Sailor, or Olga Ravn’s My Work. Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels had not yet been translated and published in the UK. Avni Doshi hadn’t written Burnt Sugar. Sheila Heti hadn’t written Motherhood. Prescription was the order of the day in pregnancy and birth literature. Being told what to expect when you’re expecting seemed to mean being told what to do. There were exceptions but it is not easy to be an exception, which I would find out myself soon enough. If you are seen at all, and most likely you won’t be, you will be misunderstood, laden with responsibilities that aren’t yours, and punished. A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk was a tender, frank, and courageous psychical study, but look at the viciously misogynistic backlash with which it was met.

The foetus kept doing his thing, and I did mine. I read Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Hélène Cixous, Margaret Atwood, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kathleen Jamie, and, always and forever, Toni Morrison. Then, casting the net more widely, Leo Tolstoy, Nan Shepherd, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. I became increasingly struck by how little I knew about what was happening to me, month by month. How little I understood the silences breeding across centuries. Silences in which my book would also, unsurprisingly, be engulfed.

Mothering is a practical business. So, too, is writing. When I wrote Expecting, I was new to both roles, figuring things out at the level of the baby and the sentence. As I wrote the foetus in question transitioned from newborn to toddler. He crawled. He walked. He spoke. He jumped. He spun things. He tried to pluck the moon from the sky. Mothers still ask me how on earth I wrote a book during that time. The unsatisfactory answer, which is really why anyone writes a first book, is that I must have really, really wanted to. I made it happen in the way that no amount of willing can ever make a baby happen. (Trust me, I tried.)

First, the structural stuff, which we ignore at our peril. I took voluntary redundancy from my full-time job as a journalist and with the money bought the gift which all mothers are desperate to be given. Time. (You can’t, unless you’re really loaded, buy sleep.) I looked after the baby and wrote. I paid a childminder to look after the baby and wrote. I jettisoned the advice to sleep while the baby slept – I never was any good at taking advice or sleeping during the day – and wrote. I wrote straight after feeds when the baby was sated, opening my laptop with buzzing breasts and brain. (Letdown is a very electric feeling.) I wrote on park benches, one hand tapping the black glass of a tablet, the other pushing the buggy back and forth in the unending project to keep the baby sleeping. I wrote instead of taking a shower. I wrote on the sofa while the baby lay in his jungle gym, opening and closing his fat fishmouth hands at the mirrors dangling on strings. I wrote as though my life, by which I mean my sense of self, depended on it. Which, in a way, it did.

A memoir is a document of the times as well as a life. Rereading Expecting, I am struck by all that has happened, so much of it detrimental to women’s bodily autonomy, in the intervening years. It is beyond the scope (and word length) of this essay to list all the heartbreaking ways in which our rights have been dismantled during the last decade. I will mention only a few examples. Here in the UK, where I birthed and was birthed, the number of women dying during pregnancy or soon after childbirth has reached its highest level in almost twenty years. Asian women are twice as likely to die than white women during pregnancy or soon after birth. Black women are three times more likely. In Italy the right-wing government has ordered state agencies to cease registration of children born to same-sex couples, effectively removing mothers from their children’s birth certificates. Maternal death rates are rising again in many countries and in 2020, a woman died every two minutes from preventable causes related to pregnancy. And on June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal right to an abortion. Twenty-one US states have since banned or restricted abortion. The time for writing the stories of our bodies, for fighting with and for them with all the tools at our disposal – our words, our feet, our votes – more than ever, is now.

I wanted Expecting to be a deeply political book. When I wrote it I was invested in the intimate story I was telling being both particular and universal. My womb, but also everywomb. It mattered to me, hugely, that I didn’t explicitly explain, label, or, by association, justify the identity of the body doing the writing. This was not the story of a brown, bisexual, leftwing, feminist, second-generation pregnancy. This was the story of my pregnancy. I wanted to seize the narrative for myself. I wanted to hit the ground running, write without explaining why I was here or what I was up to, just like any so-called majority writer unthinkingly does. I was influenced by the way Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, and Alan Hollinghurst wrote The Swimming Pool Library. Not ‘Look, this is how people like us live’ but ‘Come, join me, I admit you into my confidence’. I wanted the sociopolitical, historical, racial, and patriarchal structures of my specific situation to breathe through every single hard-won line. I still want all these things, but we are now living in a time when being explicit about what you mean is also important. So to nail my rainbow colours to the mast, when I write ‘pregnant woman’, ‘woman’, ‘mother’, or ‘motherhood’ in Expecting, I include anyone who includes themselves in this description, and lives, and births, in its confines, hazards, shadows, and liberations. Mothering, like gender (and writing!), is in the doing of it. It is more verb than noun. And there have always been so many of us labouring unnoticed at its coalface.

Another thing that struck me when rereading: how much it mattered to me that the nine chapters were essays. We were not living in such pro-essay times then in the UK. Some in the publishing industry advised me not to use that word, as it might put readers off. Why did I care so much? Sometimes we need an older iteration of ourselves to provide the answer. Forty-four-year-old me reckons it’s because I wrote Expecting in the first truly restricted time of my life. Motherhood. A deeply pressurised time. A time which necessitates a narrowing of some horizons and, though I couldn’t see them then, a widening of others. And an essay, in the original Montaigne sense, is structured in direct opposition to this contraction of horizons. It comes from the French ‘essai’ meaning to attempt or try out. It is an open door. It is an aimless meandering. It is an experiment for its own sake. It is mother-time-friendly (as in nice and short). It is freedom of the mind.

Also, how invested I was in metaphor! In finding my own metaphors, as Plath had done. In coming up with new ways to say the things that had been said wrong, or not said at all. In lyricism for its own fecund sake. In – cringe – using three adjectives when one would do. I regard my first book like I do my teenage self. She’s a bit much, but she had… what’s the female equivalent of balls? Labia majora?! These days, I’m edging closer to Sontag than Plath. I want to stop messing about, strip away the metaphors, look directly at the thing itself, and describe it. Clarity is more beautiful to me now than metaphor.

Finally, I am struck all over again by what I did not know. Not about pregnancy and birth but as Sontag called it, the night side of life. Illness, and death. In the same decade I became a mother, I lost a mother. My mother. The one who made me. So I notice now, with some discomfort, that when I wrote about death in Expecting it tended to be as a theoretical counter to birth. Metaphorical only. How could it have been otherwise? I had not been forced to look directly at death itself.

Nor, indeed, had I seen motherhood. The moment that probably touches me the most is the sole appearance of my son at the close of the penultimate essay, throwing cushions to the floor and running fire engines up the arms of the sofa. What I also didn’t know when I wrote those words, but was starting to strongly suspect, was that he, the foetus forever sealed in the womb of this book, was autistic. That life would look nothing like I thought it would. That it would be harder, better, and much less (and, okay, sometimes more) frightening than I could have imagined. That four years later, almost to the day, his sister would be born, turning me into one of those insufferable women who say giving birth was the happiest day of their life. That more life, and death, would happen. That we would be okay. That it really would be a beginning, after all.

Chitra Ramaswamy,

January 2024

One

November

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!

The Awakening, Kate Chopin

An unremarkable Sunday morning in November. A noirish time of year when nature’s reel turns monochrome and the world becomes as smudged as old newsprint. Sombre November, as TS Eliot called it. The last gasps of another year. On the morning dog walk the leaves were pockmarked from an excess of autumn and had lost their florid complexion. They were beginning to blacken now and stick to my shoes as though slick with a thin layer of oil. It was the eleventh month of the year, though Novem means nine for it was the ninth month in the Roman calendar. Nine months. A clue dropped by a season, like so many leaves.

And so with all this promise of death I found myself taking a test proposing life. A frightening test, though perhaps there is no other kind. A test taken by oneself in the privacy of one’s own bathroom towards the end of another year. A test whose result is revealed not by a mark on a page but by a stream of one’s own bog-standard urine. A test for which there are only two results. Either life is there, burrowing in a place as close to you as your own heartbeat yet as mysterious as the inside of a mountain, or it is not and life, the other kind, goes on. How very simple. And how brutal too.

Like however many millions of women before me and who knows how many in tandem, I squatted, hovered, took aim and waited for a blue cross to materialise in a tiny window of possibility. I had done this a few times in my life. In Glasgow in my early twenties when my partner at the time had just moved to London and I felt vengeful and very alone. The result? Relief. Or more recently in Soho, in one of the new breed of budget design hotels characterised by receptions without people and rooms without windows. That time? Disappointment. On both these occasions, the result had been negative. Life, the other kind, had gone on.

This time was different and as is often the case with major moments, I knew before I knew. I had eaten oysters twice in the previous week – unusual in itself and almost wilful in retrospect – and felt seasick as each sup slid down my throat. I had drunk whisky, smoked roll-ups and sung along to the Proclaimers in Edinburgh’s The Port O’ Leith, which in its own salty way is no less glamorous than sipping Bellinis in Venice or going for bagels in New York. The Porty, as it’s known to locals, is an icon of Leith on my street, with its skew-whiff nautical decor and rousing nightly rendition of ‘Sunshine on Leith’ when last orders are called. But instead of feeling the euphoria that comes from belting out ‘sorrrrroooowwww’ with the bonfire of Laphroaig on my breath and the scent of the Firth of Forth on the air, I felt jittery. Five days previously, there had been a small rusty mark on a pair of pants, a question mark written in blood. It was enough of a hint for me.

And yet I had cause to doubt what is known in the business of trying to conceive – and one soon discovers that it is first and fore-most a business – as an implantation bleed. That is, the moment when the ball of cells that goes by the dramatic name of a blastocyst burrows into the wall of the uterus, the most minuscule of plants taking root and making the ground shed tears of blood in response. Little blastocyst blasting its way into the world, so small and uncertain it has yet even to become embryonic.

My partner and I had been trying to make this everyday miracle happen for almost eighteen months. It had not been easy for us. We were two women for a start. The story was the kind of romantic comedy that would never get made, with all the madcap races across cities and highly charged encounters in hotel rooms you might expect. Stories that were good for dinner parties but bad for life. We had already done so much. Our preparation had been flawless; all we lacked was an outcome.

To start, a civil partnership to ensure we would both be the parents of a baby that might never be, a leap of faith that no heterosexual couple is required to make. Bizarrely, this needed to take place not just before birth but before conception, making the most private of acts a matter of public interest from the outset. And so it went on. Three donors and three corresponding excruciating encounters up and down the country. Home insemination kits bought off websites with deflating names like prideangel and fertilityzone. Blood tests at the GP’s to ensure I was fertile. Dispiriting monthly trips to buy yet more ovulation tests, cruelly addictive (and expensive) little sticks that so resembled pregnancy tests I began to feel dumbly thrilled when they showed up positive. Then a growing obsession with donor profiles on international cryobank sites, where you can buy sperm by the syringe and have it delivered to you in a hissing nitrogen tank, which if nothing else sounds like the