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On pregnancy and...Isolation


Last October, my family and I went on holiday to New Orleans. It was planned as a celebration of my jazz-loving dad turning 70, and the aim was to consume as much food, music, and booze as possible in a week. The whole gang, including ‘extended boys’, were going to be there, we found an amazing Air B’nB in Bywater, and the trip was going to fall over Hallowe’en weekend. All told, it had the makings of an epic family holiday.
Obviously, I booked this before I realised I was pregnant…although as I write I realise that actually I’m not sure that is necessarily obvious. Maybe I would still have gone even if I had known – I think I definitely would have felt a bit of a prat for saying no on the basis of weighing a stone more than usual and not being able to have a drink. In any case, we went. And some aspects of it were tough.
The problem with being pregnant is that it is only you. As my mum said when I came home early with her one night, exhausted and jealous of the others going on to a gig, “you feel like an island”. And you really do; pregnancy is something you do alone and it can be lonely and isolating. Of course excellent partners and family are huge helps, but sometimes you feel like you’re at a party you weren’t invited to.
There was one moment that sticks in my mind as a particular low. We were walking down Frenchmen Street on Hallowe’en night. The whole place had a fabulous carnival atmosphere, it was hot and busy and full of people, even out on the street. Everyone was smoking, drinking, and dancing in the balmy Louisiana air. We went into the One-eyed Cat to watch a set, standing near the back where it was marginally less busy, and C got the drinks in for everyone (not me). The band were amazing and everyone around us was going crazy. And then I burst into tears. I cried even more because I had been trying so hard not to, that when it happened it came out in enormous panicky sobs.
C took me home and I cried in bed instead. There are a couple of reasons why I was crying, and they look something like this:
1.     I was worried people were going to bash into me – no-one had noticed my bump and it was dark and rammed
2.     Everyone was having fun around me and I felt like a grumpy alien
3.     This is the real reason – at any other time in my life, I would have been having the time of my life. This was such an incredible, priveleged position to be in – in an amazing city, surrounded by loved ones, listening to incredible music and with no worries at all. ‘Normal’ Becky would have been all over it, for the rest of the night.
And there, I think, lies the rub. When you’re pregnant you are not your normal self, and when you don’t feel normal you cannot force it. It’s OK not to do the things you love if you don’t love them any more, because that is temporary. And normality will (I’m told) resume – with an extra thing to love thrown in the mix.

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