sea-change
It’s been over four months since I last wrote you here and, not unrelatedly, I’m writing you today—still somewhat unbelievably—18 weeks pregnant. I’m just beginning to emerge from what settled in almost immediately after the positive test: an overwhelming, unmistakable instinct to withdraw any extra outward-oriented energy to focus everything I had inward, toward this budding life within. The force of this inward energy was gravitational. It felt both new and ancient.
My intention with each issue of The Liminal is to write you from what’s most visceral and present. From May till now, what was most visceral and present was too overwhelming and intimate to write. Today I’m stepping gingerly back into the waters of our ongoing conversation, which I’ve missed deeply these months of pause, knowing much of this experience still resists my ability to capture it in language, but I will try. In doing so, I am writing with immense tenderness for those who might be in the midst your own fertility journeys, wherever you might find yourself along the often-disorienting terrain, with sharp awareness of and respect for the immense range of experiences therein.
I’m writing this personal missive in part because so far, pregnancy feels to me like the most visceral expression of liminality I’ve experienced: a betwixt-and-betweenness that itself is constantly shapeshifting, alongside my body, and this body inside me. It’s prompting me to revisit the concept of liminality anew, along with my relationship to change, not-knowing, and surprise. And because in my months/years of pre-maternal ambivalence, interrogating, wondering, longing, trying, and low-key obsession with the subject of motherhood, I craved reading about others’ experiences, not in neat retrospect but from the messy and ineffable frontlines.
Still, writing about an experience while undergoing it feels strange. Writing about a pregnancy itself, new to every chapter of it, feels even stranger.
In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (one of my summer reads), Claire Dederer writes about her reactions to pregnancy as a reader:
“Even to this day, I feel my interest in a story waning if a pregnancy occurs… as a reader, pregnancy makes my heart sink. Pregnancy is the end of the narrative. All the doors shut at once. Don’t cut yourself off from options! I want to yell at the pregnant characters in these books.”
Reading these lines (newly pregnant) struck chords of recognition and defiance in me. My greatest fears about motherhood, I've discovered over the past years of interrogating it, have had to do with this very harrowing sense of the end of the narrative. Motherhood is laden with cultural and structural histories (and presences) of erasure, subordination, sacrifice, and disregard. There exists this sense of a looming current threatening to swallow one into a larger collective narrative: as Dederer puts it, “doors shut,” options cut-off. No wonder this felt terrifying. What space is there, in this, for deviation, nuance, creativity, an otherwise?
I’ve been craving narratives of pregnancy and motherhood that are not endings, but beginnings. As the inimitable Jia Tolentino articulates in her recent interview with Glennon Doyle, on the struggle of locating such narratives on motherhood:
“The way that motherhood is often spoken about and written about is this sort of sweet, filigreed net that’s hovering unspoken over a giant lake of existential fear and instability — and that’s the thing that’s making it so beautiful — that lake is the thing that’s giving it its meaning. It’s not the love, it’s not the snuggles, it is the vast glimpse of life and death that you’re getting constantly around all of it. It’s hard to write about. It’s hard to think about.”
I don’t know this lake yet intimately, or maybe I am just standing on its shores, dipping my toes into its waters. But to me, this lake sounds nothing like the end of a narrative.
I’ve been lingering with these questions Maggie Nelson asks in The Argonauts:
“Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s ‘normal’ state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?”
I see inhabiting this paradox—the intimacy and the alienation, the transformation and the conformity—as writing against the sense that pregnancy is the end of an interesting narrative. Because I have to believe—for myself and for all the people who walk this path—that even if it is the end of one possible narrative, it is most certainly the beginning of infinite others worth witnessing. And so, I’m devoted to exploring this wildness, strangeness, and sense of transformation—below the filigreed net, and within and beyond pregnancy—as a fieldsite of liminality.
wading through terra incognita
When I last wrote you in mid-April, I shared an essay I wrote in The Rumpus about pre-maternal ambivalence. Four weeks later, I found out I was pregnant. If it appears the two—the writing of the essay, the getting pregnant—are tethered closely in time, I can tell you they were not.
My missives here to you the last year+ were admittedly vague and thinly veiled, written from an immense fog of uncertainty I can only recognise through the clearing of retrospect. The two “overlapping timelines” I alluded to here were 1) being on the tenure-track academic job market, unsure if or where I would land, mapped onto 2) these unpredictable, un-timeable wilds of fertility. This was ramified by the question of whether to pursue these in the US or Scandinavia, both very different cultures and paradigms of not only academia but also motherhood (I’ve been writing a lot about this elsewhere I hope to someday share with you). I harboured a hope that a pregnancy would somehow make this seemingly un-makeable decision for me. The mystical part of me understands now that it couldn’t, wouldn’t.
To make the long, circuitous story of these two threads somewhat linear (though certainly not causal): the morning of my job talk in the US in February, I learned I’d been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship for my next research project (I’ll begin in fall 2024; more on the project itself another time). In April, I accepted an Assistant Professorship in medical anthropology at the University of Copenhagen (beginning this October)—joining a vibrant, brilliant, and incredibly kind environment of scholars I’ve dreamt of working with since first visiting in 2018. I finally was able to exhale a breath I felt I’d been holding for 8 intense months.
In mid-May, on an early morning when I least expected it (side-eye to those who say cheerily “that’s when it happens!”), two dark lines appeared on a pregnancy test.
In anticipating that fateful moment through the camera-film of my imagination for nearly a year prior, I always pictured an electric joy, followed eventually by a stomach-drop of “what have I done.” The stomach-drop, I was surprised to find, never came. Maybe it was the hormones, whose steady cascade made themselves known in my cells almost on command. Or the months spent playing-out the “what have I done” question in my mind by devouring stories of others. Still, the immediacy of the joy had a staying power that existed alongside, maybe because of, my knowing that from that moment, whatever happened, my life was/is about to change radically, in ways I had/have no idea. And for some reason, that idea felt less terrifying and more…fascinating.
I mentioned in April’s newsletter that writing Terra in 2021 helped me cross a bridge. That bridge moved towards a space within that felt integrated enough to start trying to pursue motherhood. Not necessarily “ready,” if that nebulous space even exists, but curious and open enough for my life to make a radical turn, to be taken by surprise, for this experience to do whatever shattering and reforming I imagined it would.
totality and surprise
Four and a half months in, the shattering and reforming seem already to be underway, but I’ve been as surprised by their intensity as I have by their gentleness. The word that keeps coming to me to describe these early months is totalizing — the fatigue, the wonder, the nausea (finally receding), the new frontiers preoccupying my imagination, the sheer awe. Another is surprising — thus far, pregnancy has run mostly contrary to my predictions and projections, a reminder: there are real limits to what the mind knows, only revealed through the lived experience of the body.
The bone-deep fatigue in those early weeks was unlike any I’ve ever felt; the nausea like spending every waking moment reading in the back-seat of a car on windy roads for two months straight; the food aversions almost comical. For the first time in my adult life, my anxiety has quieted significantly, not intensified as I had expected. This is maybe the biggest surprise. I feel strangely more equipped than in any past season of meditation or embodiment practice to distinguish the rumination of my monkey mind from the voice I’m coming to recognise as my body (who sounds surprisingly calm and wise when I actually listen). As someone who struggled with an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and restriction throughout my late teens and early 20s, I am *yet again* rewriting my relationship with growth—not as something to fear or resist, but as a power to soften into. My energy is returning, but my movement these days is slower. On a good day, I can still run (slowly, with walk breaks), my yoga practice is subtler in some ways, deeper in others. Writing feels urgent—ushering revisions of my academic book out the door and working on another creative project I’m admittedly nervous how late pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood will coexist with, but I have to trust will not completely eviscerate.
Some days are easier than others; some days are still disorienting. But somehow I feel more buoyed, more trusting. This is not something I have willed into being but had to surrender into. I still don’t know exactly where it’s come from.
The past months have also been an intense season of letting go — of old versions of self I was trying to part with even before pregnancy. Of laying down patterns of overworking and striving in every possible direction. Of admitting to the spaces where I’m exhausted, where the old ways don’t quite work any longer. Even of identifying what old dreams no longer feel present and real (we don’t talk enough about how hard this can be). The early fatigue somewhat forced this reckoning. There’s a grief to it, but one tempered by a parallel relief. And a sense of space, where something(/one) I have yet to meet is quietly growing.
For what feels like the first time in a while, I am striving not for something external to me, but within me. This striving lives entirely outside the realm of doing; it has to do with being. I am learning the difference—not intellectually, but in my bones.
By sharing what’s surprised me thus far about my pregnancy, I don’t intend to romanticize it. There are still—of course—uncertainties, fears, questions. The first trimester was especially difficult with awareness of its fragility and the split sense of a shifting inner landscape invisible to the outer world. Inhabiting a rapidly-changing body challenges everything I’ve come to know about being in one. My thoughts about this new life within me—who we expect to meet in January 2024—are filled with eager anticipation, and of course pattered with occasional worries and what-ifs. I also do not mean to suggest that pregnancy is the happy ending to the narrative, or the only answer to the questions I’ve posed—hardly.
But I do want to carve space for the glimmers of awe and wonder I couldn’t foresee. The first translucent jellyfish heartbeat on the early ultrasound, followed by its garbled oceanlike sound. The 14-week scan of what really looks like someone in there, stretching their limbs, in ardent motion. The string of synchronicities and coincidences over the past months that my rational self writes off but can’t help but stir magical thinking. The joy of sharing our news with our loved ones, the excitement written across their faces, realizing that this will not only be a person in our lives, but in their lives as well. I want to pay attention to these, too, for they are just as real.
A few weeks ago, in mid-July, I stood with one foot in the Skagerrak Sea and one in the Kattegat Sea, at the tip of Skagen, the northernmost point of Denmark. One body of water collided with the other in a soupy cauldron.
I tried tracing the line with my sight all the way down—the space right before one sea became the other—but it soon became indistinguishable, that is until the next waves collided, the next line created itself. I could see ahead until I couldn’t. If that’s not the metaphor for pregnancy, or more broadly for the sea-changes that punctuate any of our lives, I don’t know what is.
It was not only the seas that were folding into one another. The sandy grounds beneath themselves perpetually shapeshift: erased and redrawn by moving lagoons and sand-stirring winds. The geography of this point is never quite the same, in any given moment. Nothing escapes change.
Danish author Dorthe Nors writes, in her essay collection on this particular stretch of landscape A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast:
“It is in the schism that all identity is formed.”
I am feeling waves, versions—of current and past selves, this self and the separate-yet-tethered other self growing within, of dreams and potentialities—lapping up against one another until they become imperceptible, dissolve. It is messy and sometimes raging, like any sea if you linger long enough to really witness it. But mostly it is raw and strangely beautiful, and I feel grateful to be here to swim in it.
Writing prompts for sea-changes:
What sea-changes are you currently noticing within or around you?
What versions or parts of self are lapping up against each other?
Can you follow the line until it dissipates?
How does it feel, to bear witness?
Readings, resources, inspirations:
Four months is a long time away, and in that time I’ve gathered a bountiful collection of readings, resources, and inspirations for you—along with a playlist for squeezing out the last juices of summer. I hope to send this out in a separate Late Summer care package of sorts at the end of August. Stay tuned!
HARVEST Retreat in Provence : one spot left!
Together with my dear friend Franziska Schmitt, I will be hosting a yoga, meditation, and creative retreat in the heart of Haute-Provence, France, held at a 150-year-old Cistercian monastery, from September 18-22. We gather in the final week of Late Summer for five days of somatic attunement and creative practices for sowing seeds, harvesting fruits, and transitioning (inner & outer) seasons with intention, connection, and intuition.
An incredible group of people from Sweden, Germany, and the US has gathered and we have one final spot open — is it yours?
A heartfelt welcome to join us! Details and registration here—
WITHIN returns for our *Fifth* Season this autumn
*my last season before maternity leave in 2024!
WITHIN—a 3-month workshop series for writing from/through/into the body—is my heart’s work. I’m thrilled to be offering a fifth season before going on maternity leave in 2024.
WITHIN Season 5 begins September 28 and ends December 11. We gather live on Thursdays for 2-hour Labs and select monthly Mondays for 75-min writing circles, all beginning at 19 CET / 18 GMT / 1p EST / 10a PST.
The theme for Season 5 is Deeper. We’ll travel deeper into our writing practices, shifting our physical practice from our usual yoga asana (still available via recordings) to subtler somatic attunement practices, meditation, pranayama (breath) and Yoga Nidra as preparation for our writing.
Registration opens for past participants of WITHIN and the waitlist this Monday, August 21. I’m holding space for a more intimate group this season, so spots will likely be limited and fill quickly. If you are interested, please add your name to the list below to get early access to registration:
Thank you for your time and presence. It feels so tender to share this news with you. I was also deeply touched by your responses to Terra Incognita and the intimate stories you shared with me. I wish I could gather all of us in a circle to share and witness our ambivalences, questions, and hopes—among non-parents, parents, and someday-parents, alike—and to feel less alone.
If any elements of today’s issue resonate with you, if you are navigating your own sea-changes, I would genuinely love to hear from you—drop a comment below or hit reply.
Wow, Allie! Congratulations on this new little life on the way and motherhood unfolding. This is the most contemplative, nuanced reflection I've ever encountered on pregnancy and the journey into motherhood and the immense spectrum of perspectives and emotions it stirs up. Kudos to you for being willing to stand in the uncertainty of it all, and the truth of your experience and resist the forces that try to pull us "on script" to how we're "supposed" to think/feel. What a gift your trail-blazing here can be to others. There are few shifts more complex and nuanced than the journey to and transformation into motherhood, yet we live in a patriarchal, capitalist culture that has almost no space for the realness of this. I'm wishing you ample external support and deep inner richness as you continue to navigate all the surprises, joys, and pains of being undone and remade in the transformational passage. Sending you such a big hug from half a world away. XO
Allie, this is so beautiful. A huge congratulations on all of this amazing news, I'm so glad you will be at the University of Copenhagen! So happy for you and your family.