pregnancy | Sadie Hasler

Body

Posted on December 20, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

Sitting on the bed just now, jumble-headed & waiting for my eyes to clear enough to get up for a wee, I looked down at my swollen tummy and really looked at it. What a change. I thought about the inner intricate whirrings & industrious processes, makings of a life that i can take no credit for with my knowing brain. My body has taken over. My body, which I have never loved nor even liked much. I have been unkind to it every day.

Some people love their bodies during sex, or in the act of dressing or displaying, of styling or posing or playing or sporting or pushing themselves beyond a limit they refuse to accept; love themselves in the freedom of private pleasure, of solitary nudeness, in childish unconsciousness or the unthinkingness of orgasm; in relief, in the defiance of unacceptable sickness, in healing, in surprise at still being here, in joy they ever were, in determination to stay and be and live while they still have a body to carry them around, to permit them the grace of their fleeting existence.

I’ve still never liked my body much in any of that. But I just realised in the half-dark, with a little thing stirring awake beneath the massive earthlike arc of my skin, that I really like my body. Love it, even. Not the look of it, but the fact of it. Its new purpose.

I don’t know how I’ll feel about it in the last few weeks of pregnancy. I don’t know how I’ll feel about it during birth, or immediately afterwards, or soon afterwards or long afterwards, until it starts to age and ail me as it will. But for now, the biggest and strangest and most natural-unnatural I’ve ever been, I really love my body. And I will love loving it, for a while.

Up the Duff & Terrifyingly Fine

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I told everyone I was pregnant yesterday. It wasn’t a prank or anything. It’s true. I’ve just been keeping it under my hat for 22 weeks. Well, it started under my hat then when it got a bit bigger I had to admit defeat and transfer it to my tum and honour the traditional gestational process. (Turns out a uterus is definitely better for that sort of thing than a beret.) And now it’s grown even more and there’s no getting around it anymore. Especially in confined spaces with a rucksack on. I am with child. Having a baby. Knocked up. Preggers. Up the duff. In the family way. Expecting. No longer able to say I just ate a lot of pasta.

There’s a little human growing inside me. A girl. Holy smoke.

And this is literally the best way I could think of telling people. A sort of jocular awkward kind of joke about hats and pasta, because I actually feel really shy saying anything about it at all. The kind of shy that people would scoff at and say “Yeah alright, Hasler. Shy. Course.” But I am. Because for all my splurging about sometimes intensely personal things, half a decade of writing a pretty open book column, talking about being pregnant feels like the next level of sharing. Writing columns or articles about suicide, grief, depression, other big dark things, is fine; they’re important to me, part of my guts and nerves and heart and pulse, but I’m not protective of them. I just say what I think and out it goes. But I am protective of this little thing that’s wriggling about in my big round belly. That’s a completely different thing. A creature. A living thing. Something that I must look after with every bit of strength and love and determination I have. Every good thing I possess must go into making this human grow and learn and be happy. I will have to learn and grow more in order to do a better job. A job and a devotion I must honour until I die. I’ll have to keep five steps in front of her, half a watchful step behind, and a silent step to the side, by her side, all at the same time. Until death us do part. That’s an unfathomably massive thing.

I cannot believe they’ll only let people drive a vehicle after months of expensive lessons and a big scary test, but this – actual creation – we can just crack on with on our own after a bottle of wine on a Friday night and a couple of pregnancy tests a few weeks later in the bog at work. I keep expecting someone to say “Sorry Hasler, the results have come back and you’re not cut out for it after all. That’s it; put it back.” And I wouldn’t know where to start with putting it back. I can’t even get cereal back in the box after it’s spilled on the floor. (Not that you should, but I do hate waste. Five second rule and starving kids in Africa and all that.)

And here I am, still joking about it, like it’s a box of Cheerios I could adios.

When it’s the least funny thing I have ever known. Having a baby. It’s the biggest, realest, scariest, loveliest, most important thing. I am insanely wired on the all-consuming seriousness of it, and already ready to kill for her. I am protective of her eyelashes and fingertips and her tiny little pouting mouth. I am protective of her tiny doll parts as all this sexual abuse stuff still blows around in a gale. I am protective of her heart and her receptiveness to the world and her experiences and all the people she will ever love and all her future joy.

I am having a baby. I can feel her kicking and I’ve got a feeling that’s what it’s all going to be about, for me, for the rest of my time from now on. And that is terrifyingly fine.