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I know last week I wrote about how pregnancy is an isolating process, but this week I'm thinking about how it can be an equalizing experience for women. I found out surreptitiously that someone I know pregnant as well. It was strange to think that all this time she was probably avoiding morning coffee and hiding urges to hurl as much as I was.

Because in the end, as much as our bodies change differently, they change, and perhaps in some way we all feel the same. Out of control, helpless, confused, surreal. There are nights I sit at home feeling like it's 2 AM and realize it just turned 7 PM, and wonder if it makes me a total loser to crawl into bed and stay there for the seventh straight day in a row. I wonder how my life turned into this amorphous blob of non-productive nothingness, like a radio with all the interesting stations tuned out. I look at all the spry women around me and envy them their normalness. At this point it doesn't feel real that there's anything actually inside of me. I mostly just look and feel like I do when I've had too big a meal and need to pop a pants button—bloated and fatigued. I wonder, in my low moments, whether this is all some cosmic joke.

But then I think about some other folks to gather strength. Like my friend telling me her baby just smiled at her for the first time. Or the story I heard about someone throwing up the entire nine months (I have it good, I guess). I picture my childhood friend who's now nearly due, and it always makes me happy. When I round in the NICU I look at the wrinkly little newborns in their spaceship-like incubators and think about the mothers who carried them. I think about how my fingers pucker in the bath and wonder what it's like being submerged for nine months. I flip through pictures of my mom when she was pregnant, of my mother-in-law with palm on her round belly, smiling a secret smile.

And then, seen in those faces and stories around me, it feels a little more real. Like my mom says, for each stage, a feeling: remember it, because then it passes. But then the memories. And the feeling you've shared a little bit of something universal.

Week Thirteen