懷孕時的閱讀

I wasn't exactly a happy pregnant "girl" when I was pregnant with Sebastian, especially during the first five or six months. It had nothing to do with him personally. It had more to do with my own confusing knowledge about what's going on with my body. I felt my body was out of control. There was the physical discomfort at first. Then, when I became a visibly pregnant woman, it was the "for-your-own-good" advice from strangers that made me realize my bulging body was like some kind of public property. Actually, there were more borders besides the public-private ones. Doctors of western medicine, doctors of traditional Chinese medicine, nurses, dieticians, yoga teachers, experts from different schools of postpartum recovery (坐月子餐) were all making suggestions about how to think about my body.

I followed the pregnancy bible, What to Expect When You Are Expecting, pretty closely. It was a necessary practical guide. But I still had all sorts of questions. I didn't just want information about pregnancy and motherhood. I wanted books that would put the knowledge about pregnancy and motherhood in some kind of meaningful contexts. Deep inside, I felt pregnancy is a highly personal matter and should be comprehended with highly personalized hues and colors. Cristina Mazzoni's Maternal Impressions: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Literature and Theory and Sandra Steingraber's Having Faith: An Ecology's journey to Motherhood were two helpful books in that regard. In Mazzoni's book, a provocative and inspiring passage by Julia Kristeva was cited:

"The arrival of the child...leads the mother into the labryinths of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter, love for an other. Not for herself, not for an identical being, and still less for another person with whom "I" fuse (love for sexual passion). But the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual and professional personality--such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. It then becomes a creation in the strong sense of the term. For this moment, utopian?"