Yes Virginia, pregnancy may very well make you listless and lonely

Some poor pre-motherhood chick on Alternet bitches about Padme's pregnancy. I haven't seen the so-called anti-Bush propaganda movie (and I certainly won't go see it in the theater, so I really can't comment, but the author of the article says:

Despite the futuristic age in which she lives, things aren't much brighter for Padme, whose pregnancy renders her oddly helpless. Though supposedly a member of the Galactic Senate, she does little more than sit listlessly in an oversized living room watching the passing hovercraft and the multiple sunsets, waiting for her belly to grow and for Anakin to come home. The only thing that changes are her outfits.

According to the story, Padme was a talented and educated girl from the planet of Naboo. She became an apprentice legislator by age 11 and by 14 was the planet's queen. A principled ruler, she fought illegal occupations and cleverly restored freedom to her planet. When her term as Queen ended, she remained active in public service and became an outspoken senator, championing peaceful solutions to the galactic wars.

So what happened? Why does Padme spend this movie sentenced to an idle life at home in tearful silence? Is this what pregnancy does to women?

I'm wondering because for the past year or two I've been thinking about having a kid myself. Now, added to my usual litany of questions--do I have the money, will I still have time to write, can my body handle it--I'm wondering if pregnancy itself will make me lonely and dull. Will I become like Padme, stuck on the sofa, isolated, brushing my hair for hours, waiting for my partner to come home from work?

In my effort to answer the "Should I have a baby?" question, I spend a lot of time looking for role models. I look for mothers who still make it to book club, stay up on current events and show up for the dinner party. I look for pregnant women who read more than just mothering magazines, who dance and go running and converse about things other than diapers and babysitters. In short, I look for mothers and mothers-to-be who are active, smart women who still make it to Galactic Senate meetings.

Ugh. I am so sick of non-mothers mouthing off about what kind of role model I, a mother, should be to them. Some women have fabulous pregnancies, cheerfully running off to the Galactic Senate. Fine. I'm happy for them. Not that I think George Lucas has any particular insight into the experience of pregnancy, but my pregnancy was a lot more like how the above description of Padme's pregnancy than it was like this chick's idealized Babystyle book-groups-and-jogging-pregnancy.

The truth is, people, pregnancy is fucking hard. It's an enormous effort by your body. Sure, it's not sickness, exactly. But it certainly does not feel like health. Pregnancy is exhausting, bewildering, and often icky. It can make you tired and lonely, and prone to sitting on the couch brushing your hair, waiting for your spouse to come home and feed you crackers. There's a lot of waiting involved in pregnancy, and it's pretty much impossible to just go on with your regular life as though nothing is going to change. Because everything is going to change.

I should be more gracious, though. I too was once as self-centered as the author, looking at all moms through the lens of what I wanted them to be and do, my own image of how I didn't want my life to change when I had kids. I too had the gall to look at moms I knew, real and fictional, and judge them: not smart enough, not active enough, too involved with the kids, pathetic. Me, I won't be a mom like that, I said.

It's a funny thing about moms, though. We'll snipe at one another endlessly, but defend to the death the honor of all mothers against the non-moms who snipe at us. You non-mom women: you have no idea what kind of mom you'll be. You have no idea what kind of pregnancy you'll have. You have no idea of the challenges to your energy and intelligence that motherhood will lay on you, and how those challenges will be, basically, invisible to non-moms who will look at you.

But go ahead and get pregnant. And when you are sitting there on the couch, letting your book group book fall and gazing dully out at the passing spaceships, give a mom a call. "Yeah," she'll say. "Pregnancy sucks ass, doesn't it." "How come no one told me?" you'll ask.