What Gets You Through

In the day’s growing heat, I feel like an overripe pear. Despite years of long-distance walking, I’m struggling with this slight rise I call “the hill.” Sweat soaks the band of my bra, and I’m puffing with effort.

I’m forty pounds up from pre-pregnancy weight, and my fetus is a small whale rolling. The head is lodged heavy in my pelvis, knocking my cervix with every step. I lumber through my neighborhood, toddler in tow.

Disability activists remind us that every body is only temporarily able: we all get injured, we all age. Physical capability is, then, a tenuous thing to build identity around — and yet I have.

It’s a trap I’ve watched other women fall into, too: pregnancy is a hard hit to the athletes. Long walks are how I feel at home in a place. Rock climbing makes me feel clever in a physical way. Lost athleticism is a double hit: in the identity, social, and hormone shifts of matresence, this body I live in isn’t reliable either.

I recovered slowly from my first baby, in humbling ways. I wasn’t just peeing myself three months postpartum: seven months in, I wore period panties under my wedding dress so as not to wet the dance floor.

At ten months postpartum, I wasn’t completely awful at bouldering, and could begin to jog without feeling that my uterus might fall out. Naturally, that’s when Robert and I went for baby number two.

“Of the twenty-seven months you’ve planned to be pregnant, you’ve done eighteen of them!” My husband calculates.

Somehow, I don’t find this heartening — but he’s not wrong. Having settled on a vision of three kids, I’m getting it done. I want to be able to train again, without another backslide on the horizon.

But for now, I’m deep in — and the weather isn’t helping.

Google predicts a 37C day on the same day my fetus reaches full term: 37 weeks pregnant, and air the temperature of a human body.

As the heat wave approaches, it squashes out: a series of unbearably but less dangerously hot days, spread to cover the whole week. So it never reaches 37 outside, but it does get to 32 in our apartment — and not below 24 for a whole week (roughly 90 and 75F, respectively). London is not big on AC.

The heat wave and the solstice come together, and I am awake at every dawn chorus. I prise myself from bed with both hands on the radiator: an assisted deep squat pull. We use the early mornings to lower blinds, shut off air flow. Wait in dim stillness through the choking heat of day.

The daily build of heat reminds me of labor: contractions that start out twinging but tractable, building almost unnoticeably, until you are reaching for aid after aid just to pass through the hours. It comes over you: a physical feat, unsatisfying for lack of control.

I hate resting, but I’m too pregnant for anything else. I want to use this heat wave as an excuse to camp by the sea. Instead, I’ve double checked the taxi times to the birth centre: contractions could happen any night.

We can’t even manage local fun: what if the bus is too muggy, late, slow? The toddler is fast, unaware of traffic, and resistant to prams. I’m too ambling to catch him, and too heavy to carry him around.

I plod in the heat, feeling hydration run out of my pores. So we stay home, staring at the thermostat’s rise. We rely on predictability as each day worsens: a single fan, a fridge, a sink.

Lying on the couch with all my skin out, I scroll the headlines of “oven trains” breaking down across England, trapping passengers for hours. Passively, I watch the toddler learn to open the freezer and dump ice trays onto the kitchen floor.

With a spray bottle, I mist and mist the air. By the time the water droplets fall to roll down my skin, they are just as hot as sweat.

When at last the toddler succumbs to sleep — worn out as much by directionless revolt as by his building sleep pressure — I run a cool bath and lie down in it.

The bath helps very little. I learn that my feet can be swollen, hot, and pruny all at the same time. The little whale in my belly swims visible rolling laps until I rise, struggling to unmold my flop-jointed pelvis from the porcelain floor. I go become couch again.

There are good parts. We wake early and walk to the park before the day grows hot. We make cherry-coconut popsicles and eat them on the kitchen floor.

When London’s fever breaks, lightning flashes and thunder rolls. Our home still trails the outside temperature, retaining five extra degrees: windows are open, but day upon day of heat have soaked into the brickwork, the bookshelves, the plates in the cupboard.

When I switch off the fan, the quiet is overwhelming. Tentatively, we venture to breathe.

Thirty-eight weeks, and my body is heavy, sore. As though emerging from a trance, I test my new (dis)abilities: family walks to the park, compression socks on my feet.

After days of mostly fruit, I’m suddenly impossible to keep fed. I snack in the night. The fetus kneads my bladder, eats my nutrients, demands extra sleep.

A few days after the heatwave ends, I do the third-trimester equivalent of a triathlon. I walk to the community garden: a twenty minute pram push each way. I ebike to the reservoir: open water, 200 meters. By the time I get home, I feel much more like me.

I’m about to rip my body open for a second time, and there’s another heat wave coming this week. But there’s perspective in this moment of reprieve.

What gets you through labor is whatever — for you — gets you through any hard physical thing. For me, that’s stubborn, obnoxious self-belief. Pregnancy is one of the most capable things a body can do, I have to remember. I need to be an athlete.

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Surviving the Joy

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Jun 19

Fall My full-time mothering starts as summer turns to fall: just me and an eight-month baby, filling time in the foreign city we’ve moved to for my husband’s job. Robert is gone from six thirty to six: thus, my daily shift is about twelve hours — not counting nighttime interruptions, breastfeeding, and everything else. It doesn’t se…