Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children… Genesis 3:16, ASV

All mothers have one thing in common: pain.

I didn’t know this then, but the truth is there’s no such thing as an uncomplicated pregnancy. We all give something up in exchange for our babies. Nearly everyone on this planet was welcomed by the sounds of a woman screaming.

No one had ever told Io that pregnancy was going to be like that. They never told her that her skin would get so dry it felt like it might split open, or that her teeth would bleed whenever she brushed them, that the pain in her hips would get so bad she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

Io wished people would stop telling women they should be grateful for their suffering instead of trying to help them with it.

I felt a sudden rush of anger and found myself craving one of Siobhan’s rants about our sexist medical system. Why did everyone have to deal with something? People have been giving birth since the beginning of the human race. Shouldn’t we know how to do it by now?

Sometimes it felt like the continuation of our species was an ongoing experiment being performed on the backs of women. Or on our wombs.

I wasn’t even hungry; I just needed something to fill the hole that had opened inside of me.

There’s this thing that happens after you give birth that people don’t talk about, or at least they don’t talk about enough: all the hormones that have been building in your body for nine months come crashing down at the same time, and it makes you feel like you’re in the darkest, most intense depression of your life. People call this “the baby blues,” which is just so condescending I could scream.

There are so many hormones in your body when you’re pregnant. They make you think impossible things, believe impossible things. I wanted to believe that I’d gone crazy for a little while, and now that the baby was here, things would go back to normal.