What People Want to Know

A Memoir by Elizabeth Catanese, a Doulas of Philadelphia client

The day of my scheduled C-section, I rode the elevator to the first floor of my parents’ condo building, very pregnant, wearing my black and white striped shirt, one of the only shirts that fit. The stripes on the shirt magnified my body, and my body was, in its enormity, a situation in and of itself. Since it was 4:45 a.m., I thought I might avoid my frequent elevator problem where the elevator doors would not close because of my protruding stomach. However, as luck would have it, two people were on the elevator looking chipper and taking up space. This time, I was able to configure myself so that the doors shut. Standing next to me, my mother said, in the span of one breath, “My daughter is pregnant with twins. They are boys. She’s a single mom by choice. We’re going to Pennsylvania Hospital right now, and she is going to deliver them!” 

My excited mother had frantically shared all my personal business in the span of one breath whenever we were together in public, for the entire pregnancy. This was her last chance, and it was my last chance to take a deep breath and try not to express annoyance. I’d decided that this sharing made my mother happy, and it was harmless enough. The couple on the elevator wished me well on my journey and sung the merits of Pennsylvania Hospital. For all intents and purposes, that interaction, like many others, went perfectly fine. But there is a kind of perpetual coming out that occurs when you are pregnant, especially pregnant with twins, that originates with the visual of your body and is amplified by people’s (often loving, often bored) curiosity. It is a phenomenon I had known about, but I did not know it would be so challenging to experience. 

Since I was mostly immobile and so nauseous during my pregnancy, taking Philadelphia public transportation soon became impossible, and I became reliant on Lyft to travel anywhere (even a few blocks away). Lyft drivers had many different reactions to my twin pregnancy, from trying to walk me into my door, to praising God, to talking about their grandchildren. But the most common reaction was to ask how my partner felt about the situation. The most memorable was a driver who asked about my husband. When I explained that I was a single mother by choice, he said, “So, you had sex with some guy and said, ‘Thanks, but peace out! I don’t need you. I’m going to be a single mom by choice!” I said no and changed the subject. “Do you have kids?” I asked, all the while imagining a scenario where after a nice dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, I had sex with a random guy for the sake of his sperm, followed by an emphatic post-coital declaration of intent. I suppose it happens like that sometimes. The reality is that I had selected a sperm donor from California Cryobank, with some friends, over a dinner of salmon. If you think about it for a second, this is no less absurd. But I saw the Lyft driver trying desperately to understand how I fit into the schema that he knew, one in which it was impossible for a woman to have children without sex with a man. He was happy not to have children, he said. It was important to him to select the right person to raise them. The ride ended with him seeming pleased by our conversation and me feeling, as the Brits on The Great British Baking Show often say, “a bit gutted.” 

“ Still, I was grateful to get out of the car to enjoy a few steps of anonymity on the sidewalk until an old lady smiled knowingly and I smiled back, frustrated at what she didn’t know. ”

What exactly was it about that conversation that bothered me so much? Was it that he had overstepped a boundary? Was it that I had not known how to draw it or where one should be? Another Lyft driver, a twenty-year-old from Cambodia, whose wife was pregnant with their first child, seemed genuinely interested in my story and was quite exuberant learning about sperm banks and even exactly how IUIs worked. It seemed he saw it as a kind of research into American culture. He asked questions, and I answered them happily, assuring him that my method of conception was not how it was usually done. He was nonjudgmental and genuinely interested in expanding his knowledge of the world. Still, I was grateful to get out of the car to enjoy a few steps of anonymity on the sidewalk until an old lady smiled knowingly and I smiled back, frustrated at what she didn’t know. 

The pool in my parents’ condo was another place where commentary often occurred. Once when I was swimming, a person asked me about my partner, and I said I was going to be a single parent. “We all have something,” she exclaimed. Another time, an older woman saw that I was pregnant, and my mom gave her short speech revealing the circumstances. The lady shouted to me, clear across the pool, “Where’d you get your sperm?!” This made me laugh. It turned out that her daughter had had a college roommate with a known donor, a friend from Vietnam. Apparently the known donor had a big role in his kid’s life. She thought what I was doing was great, and brave. She didn’t seem to care about anything that wasn’t traditional about my path. And still, I was grateful to get out of the pool and to a room alone with my body and its changes.  

Some people were solicitous in ways that almost felt good. The checkout attendant at Rite Aid was concerned that I was still working and wanted to help me brainstorm how to get out on leave sooner. People asked if I needed them to reach anything from the shelves. A lady at the grocery store said to me, “Oh boy, look at YOU!” and laughed. “You go ahead, sweetie.” And, at Barnes and Noble, while I was waiting for a tutoring client, a woman came up to me to test her powers of intuition and ability to read my body. “Are you having twins?” she asked. “Yes,” I replied. “I knew it!” she said, walking away. The interaction was so weird it was almost delightful, but still, I felt exhausted by it.

“In the moment of delivery, time stops. There is no commentary about what is to come. ”

Fast-forwarding again to the day of my delivery, the opening of the door of my body by C-Section, the physicality of the process changed me. In the moment of delivery, time stops. There is no commentary about what is to come. There is no question about how you got there. There is only the table, the lights, the body engaged in getting a new person/people into the world. I suppose I imagined even then having to explain my decision to be a single mother, but I only remember being asked if I was still dizzy, being told how the feeling of an elephant standing on my chest was the temporary removal of my uterus. 

Giving birth requires absolute presence, the kind of presence repeated when tending to the needs of two infants. With infants, there is no need to come out about anything. There is only hunger and diapers and desperation expressed in primal cries. As a person pregnant with twins, I was always a meta-presence, a person containing future people. Since there was no tangible reality yet in the form of children, it made sense that my body became a surface for other people’s projections. It will not surprise most people, but it was fully surprising to me that the process of delivery and tending to infants is about the body rather than a commentary on the body. In this way, childbirth was and parenting is a great relief. 

Within days of delivering the babies, my body returned, more or less, to its original shape, except for the thick purple lines and excess skin flaps visible when I’m not wearing a shirt. If you were to ask me the logical take away from my experience as I was living it, I would have said, “If you are pregnant, make sure to set clear boundaries with people.” However, I’m not quite sure that’s it. After I’d delivered, suddenly no one knew that I had had babies. And, to tell the truth, I missed the attention that I had so hated while it was happening. While it was exhausting to have people so in my business, I realized that it was also wonderful that they were seeking some kind of connection. 

When I sat down for my first independent, postpartum lunch, the waiter came up to me and asked what I was having. “Two boys,” I said, instinctively. He looked confused and pointed to the menu. I ate my open-faced turkey sandwich in peace.