I love research. It’s my favorite part of writing, in that I don’t have to be writing to do it. I can be watching TV, reading the internet, visiting a museum, or taking a pole-dancing class, and tell myself that I’m not procrastinating, I’m researching. (Note: I have never taken a pole-dancing class. It looks hard.)
Of course, some books require more research than others. However, The Baby Plan was an anomaly for me in that it required almost no documentary watching, no poring through books, no scouring the far corners of the internet for a crucial piece of information. Almost no research at all . . . because I was currently living it.
That’s right, I wrote The Baby Plan while planning for a baby of my own.
Now, some might think this is a prescient bit of authorial wisdom. Hey, I know, I’ll write a novelization about the experience of being pregnant, and in that way get to write off all my medical expenses! But I’m not as savvy as that. In reality, this book came about because I was desperately trying to figure out what I was going to write next—and not having much luck—when my agent and editor pitched me the idea of “something to do with modern day pregnancy.”
They thought I could speak to this subject, because I had already gone through it with my now three-year-old son. Surely all I had to do was harken back to that time and put to paper what the experience was like.
Little did they know I was currently reliving that time, eleven weeks into gestating my daughter.
At first I was hesitant. Because I couldn’t possibly encompass the vastness of what pregnancy is. It’s harrowing, it’s joyful, it’s disgusting, it’s beautiful. Everyone experiences it differently. But then a lightbulb went off. Since it’s impossible to represent everyone’s pregnancy, I didn’t have to even try. I just had to represent what it was like for Nathalie, Lyndi, and Sophia to be pregnant.
It can’t be too surprising that many of their experiences turned out to be mine?
Like Lyndi, I gave up my beloved poached eggs for breakfast, because undercooked eggs are a no-no and this makes me sad to this day.
Like Sophia, I had some extreme porno-sized boobage.
Like Nathalie, toward the end of my pregnancy, I was retaining so much fluid it changed the shape of my eyeballs, and I had to forgo contact lenses for the last month or so.
I would wake up in the night with my hands numb and tingly, from pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel.
Also, my leg would seize randomly while sleeping, causing me to wake up and freak out my husband while I yelped in pain.
Both my son and daughter sat on my sciatic nerve, making it almost impossible to walk for the last month of pregnancy. When I absolutely had to move, my husband insisted I use a cane.
I did drool like a basset hound.
I did have my mom tell me about her pregnancy-induced genital edema, and that’s something I could have gone my whole life without knowing, thanks.
I did paint my daughter’s room a feminine blue, which required Pinterest links to convince people it would work.
I did take a tumble—on the sidewalk, not on my bike—and ended up in Labor and Delivery under observation for a couple of hours one weekend. (Pro tip: it’s pretty boring, so bring a book!)
I have received daily pastel emails.
Way too many people asked me how I was feeling.
In nonpregnancy real life occurrences, my driveway has flooded. I have geotracked a specific Starbucks simply by analyzing a picture (or rather, my brother-in-law got way too into figuring out if it could be done and we discovered that it could). I have broken an IKEA chair.
And . . . I had a secret pregnancy Twitter account. I needed a place to marvel at the insanity pregnancy brought into my life, but on social media I chose to keep my first pregnancy mostly private, for a hundred different reasons. I worried that I wouldn’t be seen as myself by my job, by my friends . . . and I also worried about if something horrible happened. If everyone knew about the pregnancy, they would then also have to know about this theoretical tragedy. I couldn’t face the idea of having my pain be public. So I kept it to myself as long as possible.
But I still needed to express myself somehow. To put it out into the ether, yell into the void. So, I created a Twitter account that became the place where I vented in 140-character bursts, under the handle @WTFPreg. It still exists, if you want to check out the real time thought processes of a newbie mom-to-be. Which, it turned out, I needed reminding of.
As much as it was a coincidence that I was pregnant while writing this book, it was a really good thing that I was. Because all the tiny annoyances and oddities of the first pregnancy had just become a blur of memory by the time I was growing big with my second.
I cannot emphasize this enough: I had two of the easiest, most run-of-the-mill pregnancies imaginable. No complications. Healthy babies. I also read all the books, was prepared in ways big and small. And yet, the myriad of stuff your body puts you through, that you have to write off as your new normal . . . well, let’s just say none of the movies or TV pregnancies I’d seen prepared me for this.
So, no matter how well Nathalie planned, or how much experience Sophia had, in retrospect I have decided that Lyndi had the best approach to pregnancy. Whatever will come, will come, and you just have to accept it as it goes along.