A Pregnant Pause

On rest, and other pre-winter musings

Happy December, and greetings from week 38 of pregnancy. The cashier at HomeGoods just asked me if I was okay, so that can’t be a good sign. But I am, in fact, okay, if not regularly out of breath from schlepping around a fully cooked human who is, surreally, on the brink of entering the world, and changing everything in mine.

Mentally I feel a surprising calm, probably due to the fact that a month and a half ago I finally, officially turned in Book 5 and have since been on a hiatus from work. I’m finished with big picture edits, and copyedits won’t come back until the end of January. For now, I’m done.

These past six weeks have been the first substantial chunk of time I’ve taken off from working in several years—longer than I can remember, because I didn’t take a real maternity leave after I had my daughter in 2022—and the break has been much needed. Initially, I told myself I was going to use the time off in intentional, productive ways. For one, I would pay more attention to this Substack. I’d been keeping a running list of content ideas taped to a note on my desk, and I finally had the bandwidth to post more often. I would write and post once a week! I’d also reengage in a light exercise routine—a daily, thirty-minute prenatal yoga class on the Peloton app seemed perfectly feasible, and like just the thing my mind and body needed.

But on the first morning of my new, clear schedule—book turned in, kids off at school, house to myself—I found that I couldn’t do anything. Instead, I felt almost physically immobilized, hit with the reality that the year’s combination of writing, parenting and pregnancy had left me flattened. The next morning was the same. And the next. Each day I felt more wiped out than the last. Each day I ignored my aforementioned list of intentions.

I know, objectively, that this is fine. The physicality of parenting two young children while pregnant is exercise enough, at least for me (sometimes my Oura ring thinks I’m hiking when I’m unpacking groceries or getting the kids ready for school, and I’ll take it), and none of my 338 Substack subscribers are banging down my door for more content (phew). But I suppose as a writer and as a person whose sense of accomplishment/self-worth is largely tied to productivity, especially during hours when I’m already paying for childcare, I’ve felt a certain pressure to keep the ball rolling towards something. To make use of this fleeting time before I give birth to my third child and lose the rest of my brain cells.

But over the past six weeks, this pressure began to leak, then disappeared altogether. Or maybe I just got tired enough to ignore it. I haven’t felt much like writing, like tapping into a cerebral place. I haven’t felt like moving my pregnant body any more than running a home and corralling two active kids already requires. And so, I…haven’t.

Instead: I napped before noon. I cleaned out closets and junk drawers. I took my daughter to ballet, and my son to his woodworking class (our part-time nanny usually does it). I sifted through hundreds (thousands?) of pictures on my phone and got the best ones printed. I updated my children’s baby books with a backlog of said photos (a chore, but I know I’ll be grateful to have these books in the future, when the nest is empty and clean and far too quiet). I finally learned how to use the slow cooker we got as a wedding present in 2019, and experimented with recipes. Why, for all these years, have I been daunted by the slow cooker? It couldn’t be easier.

I went to Michael’s the week before Halloween and bought posterboard and paint and got crafty DIY-ing an avocado costume that featured my belly as the pit. I spent an inordinate amount of time on Auction Ninja, where I bought an outdoor table and a set of botanical prints. I spent the better part of three days scouring rug websites; I ordered a runner for the kitchen that we don’t really need, that I’m debating returning after all that.

I dug baby clothes out of storage. I considered sterilizing bottles, but watched the five-hour Billy Joel documentary instead. I watched All Her Fault and The Beast in Me and savored every twisty minute. I’ve been reading at a snail’s pace, which is the way it seems to go for me at the end of pregnancy, but I recently finished Heart the Lover (it’s magic) then went to see Lily King speak about the novel at my local library. In my new book, there’s a somewhat pivotal scene where the protagonist goes to a Lily King event at a bookstore, so attending one of her events myself was a meta experience. I waited in the signing line after the talk so I could share this tidbit with Lily; she was, no surprise, entirely gracious.

We’re still finalizing the title and publication details for Book 5; I have lots to say about the story, and will as soon as I can. For now, know that it’s about marriage and motherhood and mental health, that it’s suspenseful and thematically dark. The novel is set in Aspen, Colorado, where I lived for a period in my twenties, a place that will always be close to my heart. Work is exciting at the moment, in spite of the extended pause, and I’ve spent the past weeks reflecting on my own gratitude for all that’s to come next year and beyond. I can’t wait to share more.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to hunker down as much as I can in these last days before life explodes with a change that feels impossible to anticipate. When waiting for a baby, I’ve learned, you can predict and plan until the cows come home, but you can’t know the true shape of what’s coming until the waiting gives way to an open door, until the change is there before you, unfolding in real time. The end of the third trimester means living in a liminal state, as my friend Avery described of her own pregnancy. Liminal is the operative word.

A friend recommended I read Wintering by Katherine May, and I recently started it. This passage from the opening chapter resonates:

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.

Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds.

As May emphasizes, there’s a wide range of circumstances that might induce wintering. But perhaps you don’t always need a rightful reason or excuse to hide a little. If nothing else, let my rambling here be your permission to take a break when the opportunity arises. To move through each passing moment with more intuition and less intention. To usher in mental and physical rest in a culture that likes to hijack our time and attention, that aims to jam the calendar at every turn, that can unwittingly spoil our own peace. Have many of us been subconsciously trained (tricked?) to believe that ultimate productivity generates ultimate content? It can’t just be me.

Bears and chipmunks slip into instinct by hibernating when winter tightens its grip, when early, peach-colored sunsets blaze through skeletal trees. To hibernate is to preserve life. To relinquish our own human inclination to do something, and to succumb to the natural instinct to do nothing, is something after all.