Pregnancy is Body Horror and I Love Horror Films

Who would win: my lizard brain urge to procreate, or warnings to liberal women that pregnancy and motherhood is a nightmare?

Photo by Sian Labay on Unsplash

I don’t remember a time before I wanted to be a mom.

I was raised with two working parents, both of whom would consider themselves liberal feminists. Unlike some of you who grew up in conservative families, I was decidedly not told that being a mother should be my life’s purpose. My parents probably wanted me to have kids someday, but they would have been far happier to hear me declare I wanted to be a scientist, professor, or even spoken word poet, with motherhood as an eventual, less important goal than the more pressing work of my thesis on decolonizing menstruation.

I wasn’t even given a doll until my grandmother broke the “no dolls until we say so” rule and gave me my beloved redheaded Cabbage Patch, who I aptly named “Doll.” Once Doll entered the picture, I had reached the point of no return. I only wanted dolls for every birthday or holiday, and once when my parents attempted to get me a gender-neutral bus toy, I emptied the little people out of the bus and pretended they were my children. I regularly pretended to be pregnant and fantasized about having anywhere between 5 and 10 children. Once I figured out how a woman became pregnant, I moved onto an adoption fantasy, but that had less to do with an aversion to pregnancy and more to do with sex revulsion and a desire to amass an “It’s a Small World After All” inspired troop of ethnically diverse children (hashtag problematic).

Obviously, I was on the extreme end of the “wants kids” scale. But as I got older, even I found myself affected by some of the nonstop messaging about how terrifying pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood could be. Yes, some of it was the obvious “teens shouldn’t get pregnant” stuff, but the messaging continued into adulthood. Getting pregnant in college would “ruin my life.” Getting pregnant in my early twenties would “ruin my life.” Getting pregnant before I owned a house would “ruin my life.” Even getting pregnant at the perfect time might still ruin my life, or at the very least, be a massive pain in the ass from which I never recover.