We all accept babies need to be made, or rather will be. Perhaps not in the numbers some governments would like, but let’s park demographic concerns and reasons for the falling birth rate for a moment. What we don’t seem to accept, however, is what can happen to women when making babies, or trying to.
This week I interviewed the acclaimed Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on the eve of her novel Dream Count being published. It was her first fiction book to be released for more than decade.
What Adichie said right at the beginning of our interview felt like an almost transgressive admission. She revealed she hadn’t written for so long because of the writer’s block she experienced after becoming pregnant, describing it as “terrifying”.
“It’s a really frightening place to be, because writing is the thing that gives me meaning,” she explained. “I’m not sure that it was just entirely physiological but something changed, and I just could not get back into that magical place where I can write fiction.”
Adichie had her first child, a daughter, in 2016. Last year, she welcomed twin boys, now 11 months old. While she was pregnant, she had a “very foggy feeling” and “couldn’t think as clearly”, she told me, fear in her eyes.
“I’m a person for whom thinking clearly is so important, and so to be in that kind of place emotionally is very frightening.”
I could almost feel a collective exhale around me from all the women she was able to speak on behalf of.
I also remember her telling me in a previous conversation we had on Woman’s Hour that she felt like her brain was wrapped in gauze during pregnancy.
It’s so transgressive to admit the changes that come with the wildly fluctuating hormones women experience trying to conceive, conceiving and giving birth, because being labelled hormonal has long been weaponised against women.
Taking the plunge to write publicly about undergoing six rounds of IVF to have our second child, while it wasn’t working, certainly felt transgressive.
I developed work-arounds as strong hormonal drugs took hold. Some made me feel sick, so I changed what and when I ate. Some knocked me sideways physically and emotionally, so I carefully learned to moderate my responses to people – checking in with myself as to whether my reply was how I really felt and measuring it against a version of myself that I remembered. I faked smiles and suppressed a lot of my real views – unsure if they were my views.
I forced myself to work through it all, needing the distraction. I liked that I could do something familiar, even if my body felt like a pin cushion, bruised from so many needles. At times, working was my saviour, but there nothing left on the side. Extra creativity, such as drawing with our son, went out of the window. And sometimes I couldn’t even access my one true joy: listening to music. I couldn’t bear it. The drugs made me a stranger to myself.
But I decided to write frankly about the experience as I, like Adichie, had a job where I could share how difficult and at times, terrifying the experience was. I felt it would help other women who couldn’t share similar experiences in such a public way, or any way at all, out of fear of losing their job and seeming less competent. These women are leading meetings, on shop floors and on football pitches, all the while bleeding and coping with a hormonal volleyball.
For too long, women’s experiences have been flattened out to make us good or bad, functional or dysfunctional, loving or hateful, stable or unstable.
square EMMA BARNETT
Maternity discrimination is alive and well in Britain today
Read MoreWhen I did, amazingly, have our second child, I also found it wild that in all my reading in and around parenting, pregnancy and motherhood, there were vanishingly few totally honest accounts of maternity leave, a time when exhausted women are trying to scrape the pieces of themselves back together in an order that vaguely resembles what was there before.
So over a mad week, while my husband was on a work course, I set myself a challenge to try and capture this new state. I snatched moments to write all of my thoughts and observations down before I had rose-tinted glasses firmly clamped to my face.
Six months after giving birth, getting my mind to focus again was like cranking up an old engine. It felt rusty. Like Adichie, the gauze was there and I was forcing it to loosen. The time constraints of caring for two children, and not feeling like the me before, meant I had to let go of any worry about whether my writing was any good. That was weirdly liberating.
The words flowed because I was writing in a panic about an experience I was living there and then. Once I started, I felt relief – I could still create and communicate. That powered me on and helped my mind open back up. (A few bottles of chilled rosé and some new anti-chafe shorts also helped immeasurably for all the park marching that went on, before sitting and trying to write.)
It all came out: how slowly time ticked by at times, in a way I had never experienced time before; my wedding ring still not fitting six months from giving birth; my sheer frustration that I had seen a pile of litter at the end of my street for three days and I still couldn’t find a moment to go and sort it out.
I wanted to capture the tiny things through to the big existential stuff. A mercifully short book was born.
I am still understanding the ways I have been fundamentally altered by trying to conceive, miscarriage and two motherhoods. Ultimately, I am always divided in my mind between home and family and wherever I am when I am not there. I run all decisions through the family’s needs. My sense of self and who I am is still re-emerging two years on, especially as I enter the foothills of perimenopause and board another hormonal rollercoaster.
We, as women, as mothers, are forever changed. But we are only just starting to properly explore that terrain due to the fear surrounding such public conversations. It’s slow, but the words are forming.
‘Maternity Service: A Love Letter to Mothers From the Front Line of Maternity Leave’ by Emma Barnett is out on Thursday 13 March
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