The Longest Shortest Time

Misconceptions

People sometimes ask me if I would recommend my podcast to pregnant women and I really struggle with my answer. On the one hand, there are some things I wish I had understood better before giving birth. On the other, I’d heard plenty of horror stories about childbirth and they would either terrify me or make me think, “Well, that won’t happen to me.” Naomi Wolf addresses this conundrum in her beautifully written, honest account of pregnancy, childbirth, and its aftermath in her book  Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood.

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One mother she interviews says it perfectly when she tells Wolf about a friend who answered the question, “Why didn’t anyone prepare me better?” with: “When, at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy asks, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Glinda the Good Witch replies, ‘Because you wouldn’t have believed me.'”

I’m halfway through this book and although it can at times be brutal in its realism, it is one that I wish I had read before giving birth. Because I think that having something like this in the back of my mind could’ve made me feel less like an anomaly when things went wrong. And so I think I agree with Wolf when she writes, “The idea of family will not be less precious when women are provided with a more realistic view of what happens to them in the process of becoming mothers. Rather, if we speak more honestly about the darkness as well as the light on the journey to motherhood, family life will be better understood, and therefore it can become better supported.”

Let me be clear: I am not condoning the act of rattling off horror story after horror story to a woman when she tells you she’s pregnant. Or even telling her one, really. But I feel like it couldn’t hurt to welcome that woman into the fold. To let her know about books like Misconceptions, to acknowledge that the breathtaking love you feel toward a new baby is made all the more deep by the complicated nature of becoming a mom.

What do you think? Would you pass on a link to this project to a pregnant woman? Any pregnant women out there who have listened and are glad or wish they hadn’t?

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