What to Expect: Your Guide to the Magic World of Pregnancy

Are You Pregnant?

When you are nineteen, as you begin your second year of college, while on birth control, you have your boyfriend pick up a generic pregnancy test when he runs to the gas station for cheap beer and cigarettes.

Wear baggy clothes so strangers can't tell you're pregnant. Vomit between classes. Go to class with vomit breath and resent your boyfriend who still goes to concerts and gets high. Who still does things like explore abandoned tunnels in the city in the middle of the night with friends while you are throwing up in a dank, cheap apartment.

Your Pregnancy Profile

Wait tables. Puke between taking orders and taking plates of fried food to people who know how to hold down what they eat. Vomit and piss in the same five-by-four-foot bathroom you will stand in months later with a breast pump a fellow waitress found for you at a garage sale. A pump that extracts milk from your lactating breasts by force of pressure created by your pulling the handle that moves a rubber piece just the right size, back and forth. That pulls your nipples through so hard they look like pink snakes screaming into a cave tunnel they underestimated the smallness of, while your feet shuffle on the greasy floor and one of the cooks bangs on the door as a cigarette dangles from his mouth because he only has ten minutes to take a shit.

Resent yourself for judging the career waitresses who are also pregnant and smoke in the windowless breakroom while you sit with your head on the oily table.

Your Gynecological History

Have one-sided conversations that go like this. Don't you know how that happens? What were you using for protection? Did you actually take the birth control pills? Did you miss days? Do you know how it works? My crazy (friend, aunt, mom, sister, next door neighbor…) skipped their birth control pills on purpose so they could (make their boyfriend stay with them, get their boyfriend to marry them, get the government to give them money, get people to feel sorry for them, heal the gaping hole of never being good enough that was left behind by their childhood, have someone who loved them, were bored). I mean, they didn't tell me this, I just know it.

Months One through Nine

Resent the people who eye your stomach when you can't hide it any longer. Resent the ones who overtly feel sorry for you. Resent your boyfriend for his lack of nausea. For the fact that he doesn't have to wear his jeans with a rubber band pulled between the button and its hole, who is completely unaffected by the ways in which your body is growing and stretching. Resent yourself for resenting him. Resent the way your clothes don't fit, and the way you can't afford ones that do. Resent the way you can't get the smell of fries out of your work uniform. Resent the way it makes you want to vomit. The way everything makes you want to vomit. Resent yourself for resenting everything.

Your Growing Fetus

Life has become alternating terror and beauty.

Magnetized to the fridge is satellite imagery of ocean crust shifting, outlines of movement below a surface.

You interview the yawning, yet now awake, seismologist living deep within yourself.

This week your fetus is a ball of hardening magma at the ocean surface.

Your stomach muscles are tectonic plates. They shift. Your insides shuffle.

Next month an island inside of you will move out of the water.

You are physical boundaries and paradoxes; a canyon reversed. As instinct bubbles from an oceanic cave within you, you understand the Marianas Trench is not the deepest trench there is.

You and your boyfriend are eternity shaped as a seismic hazard zone. Each week you measure subduction, and the rising seamount of life you are building; you locate the cliff of fundus, you chart the erosion of your former self. You are a contour map.

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