Matrescence

Tadpoles

Frog spawn mass together in a jellied gloop, each globe squidgy and hard like an eyeball. The black round dot in the middle is the size of a peppercorn. It doesn’t seem possible that it will change but one morning, well, there it is and the peppercorn is no longer a peppercorn but an elongated comma. The next day a few start to ​wriggle—​hectic—​like small charcoal ribbons. Feathery gills emerge overnight from their necks, like ruffs. They wiggle out of their jellied beds, free. Now, they alternately pause and float at the top of the water, or ​silk-​twitch around, looking for food. A few days later, their tails suddenly thicken and lengthen, becoming one long black arrow encased in 30-denier tights. For much of this time, they fall throuuuugh the water, and let their bodies carry them down,

down,

down.

Some are bigger than others. Some are quicker than others. Some move less. Over the next few days, their heads grow until they look like cartoon sperm, propelled through the water. Small nubs appear, the beginnings of legs. Their bodies turn from opaque to translucent, speckled with gold. Next, feet appear on each side, webbed and splayed. At the end are threadlike ​tree-​branch toes. They suck the sides of the tank where we are raising them with their black ring mouth. Their hearts? Red. A waste tube trails beneath. Flick! Their tails can ripple the surface of the water. They dive up and down, then become still and rest. Now, the bodies are dark ​green-​black with bronze lacquer spots. Beady, crocodilian eyes emerge on top of their heads. Then, their arms emerge, with ​four-​fingered hands. The head becomes more pointed and the skin becomes less translucent. Then, it is a froglet with a tadpole tail! It is! ​Then—​and you can barely believe ​it—​it is a frog. It is!

A week later, one is lying at the bottom of the pond, pale and lifeless. Ten or so tiny, ​bright-​pink bloodworms are going at it furiously, taking its body into their bodies, bit by bit.

1.
All-​day sickness

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id

What I expected in pregnancy
Sickness in the morning
Glowing skin
Shiny hair
Bigger boobs
Weird cravings

What I did not expect in pregnancy
Restless leg syndrome
Acne
Hair loss
Kiss curls
Eczema
Sciatica
Constant and severe nausea
To feel stoned
Mysteriously high white blood cell count
Mysterious infections
Numb hands
Pins and needles
Hotter (in body temperature)
Incredible sense of smell
Color changes (darkened nipples; vulva; hair color)
Linea nigra
A digestive roller coaster
Heightened sense of threat
Shame
Flatter nose
Increased vascularity leading to increased intensity of orgasm
Dry eyes
Pinguecula
Wider jaw
Needing to wee six times a night
A mouth full of blood after toothbrushing
Ecstasy
Insomnia
A preoccupying obsessive urge for the baby to live
Brain fog
Di
s. s
ol
u t. i.  o.

n. of the self

And then

To become

Something

Else

-

It happened around the time I grew a heart.

I could smell everything. The armpits and groins of those who passed by on a wide road. Specks of food on a train seat. A cigarette around the corner. The ​town—​population: ​thousands—​and what kind of soap people used that morning. Coconut or ​tea ​tree oil or Pears or if they missed a shower, all chundering around in a horrible soup. At night I could smell leftover cooking fumes as if they were particulate matter in a pillow spray. Rotting seaweed from the other end of the beach. The breakfast breath of a shop assistant. Chip fat across an ​A-​road. Postmix syrup and pub carpet seeping into the street.

Pregnancy gave me the one superpower no one has ever wanted: an extremely good sense of smell.

I was a dog now. Sniffing for danger.

Cars on the road sounded louder and appeared more aggressive; I lay awake at 4 o’clock in the morning worrying about the state of the world. My hair came loose. My forehead speckled with zits: bulbous, greasy.

I had an urge to eat most of the time. I wanted salty, fatty or sweet food on my tongue. It gave the slightest relief from the nausea.

Soft boiled potatoes. Fizzy cola. Heavy croissants. Crispy bacon and cream cheese. Melted cheese. Salt and ​vinegar–​drenched chips. Salt and vinegar crisps. Salty tuna covered in mayonnaise. Fizzy orange. Rice and soy sauce and grated mature cheddar. ​Extra-​mature cheddar. Pickled-​onion-flavored crisps.

On the bus to the British Library in London where I was working on the final edits of my first book, I would nibble oatcakes to suppress the bile climbing up my throat. Visitors are not allowed to bring food into the Reading Rooms so I’d sneak them in under my sleeves and bite secretively as I checked my sources on vulpine biology.

As soon as it turned 11 o’clock, I would make my way over the road to the greasiest spoon I could find. Order a jacket potato with tuna, sweet corn, extra ​cheese—​melted on top, please. Yes, and butter. Yes, mayonnaise on the side. Scatter salt on top. Ring pull click. Fizz. Cold brown cola. I would sit and gorge, ignoring my humiliation at being an early morning gobbler in public. In return I’d receive twenty minutes of milder nausea.

The first trimester wasn’t the healthy time I had aimed for. Fresh salad and vegetables turned my stomach most of all, and I couldn’t swim more than a few lengths in the pool without tiring. One day, I watched a video on the NHS website. “The exercise and the healthy eating will push you in the right direction for a nice, quick labor and a lovely healthy baby at the end of it.” A nice, quick labor? That sounded ideal. I’ll get back to healthy eating and exercise soon, I thought.

But as I looked on forums and read other women’s accounts, it started to become clear that many were feeling sick ​round ​the ​clock, some throughout pregnancy, and no one knew what caused it, how to treat it properly, or why on earth it was called morning sickness.

-

In the late 1980s Margie Profet, a biologist from the United States, developed the hypothesis that pregnancy sickness is an adaptation to protect the growing embryo, particularly at the time of organogenesis. This stage in the development of the fetus is the most vulnerable and susceptible to disruption. Profet’s research suggested that nausea protected the embryo from toxins because it arrests the appetite.

A small but interesting study found that women carrying male fetuses have higher levels of disgust and food aversions, because male fetuses are more vulnerable than female.

Samuel Flaxman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, built on Profet’s work with a review published in 2000 that supported her hypothesis. Flaxman found that the most common aversions were towards alcohol, meat, eggs, fish and ​strong-​tasting vegetables: foods which would’ve been habitats for ​microorganisms and toxins in our ​fridge-​less evolutionary history.

Strangely, despite the fact that almost 70 percent of women experience pregnancy nausea and vomiting, and severe pregnancy sickness can be fatal for both baby and mother, we still don’t know much more than this.

At least the medical establishment no longer believes that pregnancy sickness is the manifestation of immorality. In the surprisingly recent past, it was blamed on “neurosis, an unconscious desire for abortion, a rejection of motherhood, a scheme to avoid housework, and sexual dysfunction,” explains the ecologist Sandra Steingraber in her 2001 book Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. A Scottish physician writing in the 1940s believed that morning sickness could be caused by “excessive mother attachment.” Even Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that vomiting in pregnancy was a manifestation of fright at the alienating experience of growing a child within, of being the “prey of the species, which imposes its mysterious laws upon her” and the “conflict between species and individual in the human female.”

These bizarre ideas were the legacy of the theory of “maternal imagination,” which was prevalent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Physicians believed that pregnant women could change the growing fetus with their minds and thus congenital disorders were the fault of the mother. If she was startled by a frog, for example, the child might end up with webbed feet. Or if she spent too long gazing at a picture of Jesus, the baby might come out with a beard.

Perhaps there is a residue of the “it’s all in her head” school of thought today. The ​long-​held idea that women’s bodies and minds are in some way untrustworthy, threatening and subject to whims of ​irrationality—​such as the Ancient Greek belief of the pesky “wandering womb” roving the body causing ​problems—​might explain in part why pregnancy sickness is still not accurately described.

But almost every story we’ve been told about the reproductive process is entangled with ideology, with prevailing ideas about gender. I was taught in science lessons at school that sperm are released and race each other until the fittest and fastest sperm wins and penetrates the egg; a retelling of the hero myth, essentially, with the egg as the passive vessel. In fact, we know now that this isn’t what happens at all. Sperm cells are immature when they arrive in the vagina. Then women’s oviduct cells secrete chemicals which mature the sperm and allow it to swim. Instead of the sperm poking the egg like a needle, the egg actually enfolds the sperm and the two cells melt into one.

In 2020, a paper was published in the British Journal of General Practice by a group of clinicians who recognized that the condition of nausea and sickness in pregnancy hadn’t been clearly described by medicine or statistically modeled in any way that would enable the term “morning sickness” to be accurately analyzed. The women they studied experienced it, yes, all day, with a peak in the morning.

The study concluded that “referring to nausea and vomiting in pregnancy as simply ‘morning sickness’ is inaccurate, simplistic, and therefore unhelpful.”

In 2023, the NHS still refers to pregnancy sickness as “morning sickness.”

This terminology serves to minimize the problem. It helps explain why medical care, treatment, research and wider social support is still inadequate, especially for women who suffer most severely.

Hyperemesis gravidarum, the most extreme form of pregnancy sickness, suffered by one to three women in a hundred, can lead to hospitalization, dehydration, starvation, brain atrophy, blood clotting and death if untreated. In the largest survey to date of women suffering from the condition, 67.8 percent were bedridden throughout pregnancy and 25.5 percent thought about suicide. Younger age, social deprivation and an ethnic minority background are associated with more severe illness. Women report not feeling taken seriously, having their symptoms brushed off and being told they are exaggerating.

-

The list of foodstuffs I needed to avoid was long and peculiar: liver, Gorgonzola, Roquefort, shark, too much coffee, licorice root, more than four cups of herbal tea a day, more than two portions of oily fish per week (although I must have two). I kept hearing how important my diet was for the development of my future child and so I tried to eat healthily, but I couldn’t help but be struck by how the conversation around prenatal health was focused solely on the individual woman’s lifestyle choices (her alcohol intake, her weight, her physical activity, as well as her diet), without any meaningful consideration of the wider environment she inhabits.

One of the foods I was instructed to avoid was fish with too much mercury, such as tuna, as it can harm the unborn baby. The NHS also advises limiting the intake of oily fish because of the ​pollutants—​dioxins and polychlorinated ​biphenyls—​within.

Although some mercury occurs naturally, the reason ​fish—​one of the foods that contains the fatty acids needed to promote healthy development of the fetal ​brain—​is now considered harmful is down to human industrial activity, particularly the operation of ​coal-​fired power plants which emit mercury. Since 1882, when the world’s first ​coal-​fired power station, the Edison Electric Light Station, was built in London, industrial nations have been poisoning sea creatures and those that eat them, including pregnant women.

It’s easy to avoid eating fish if you live, as I do, in a place where other foods are plentiful, but harder in countries where it is a major food group. Pregnant Inuit women from Nunavik, for example, are exposed to high levels of contaminants. In 2017, 22 percent of women in that group exceeded guidance levels for mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls. Exposure to mercury has been associated with ADHD symptoms in Inuit children.

“When it comes to environmental hazards, not only do we dispense with the principle of ‘In ignorance, abstain,’ we fail to inform pregnant women that the hazards even exist,” writes Steingraber. She studied how various industry groups downplayed the dangers of mercury, lead and other toxins. And, over two decades later, Steingraber’s questions remain relevant: “Why does abstinence in the face of uncertainty apply only to individual behaviour? Why doesn’t it apply equally to industry or agriculture?”

What does it mean to be pregnant at the most ecologically destructive time in human history?

In 2020, a study found that microplastics cross over to the placenta, joining such dubious record locations as the top of Mount Everest and the deepest ocean. “It is like having a cyborg baby: no longer composed only of human cells, but a mixture of biological and inorganic entities,” said Antonio Ragusa, director of obstetrics and gynecology at the San Giovanni Calibita Fatebenefratelli hospital in Rome, who led the study. “The mothers were shocked.” The health impacts are still being studied, but scientists say microplastics could cause ​long-​term damage and affect the developing immune system.

How on earth does a pregnant woman protect her baby from microplastics? Or from the black carbon emitted by vehicles, which, we now know, can penetrate the placenta?

How does she protect herself from the nitrogen dioxide emitted by diesel vehicles, which increases the risk of mental illness?

How does she avoid high levels of air pollution, which seem to be linked to miscarriages?