Congratulations to Emily here, who timed a pregnancy-revealing pap walk with the release of her Vogue essay on gestation and gender. We tease Emily about her clothes on this site — it is an understatement to say we don’t love her style — but she is an elegant and insightful and bracingly honest writer. In addition to grappling with the notions of “who—rather than what—is growing inside my belly,” she had this to say that is very familiar to me:
Pregnancy is innately lonely; it’s something a woman does by herself, inside her body, no matter what her circumstances may be. Despite having a loving partner and many female friends ready to share the gritty details of their pregnancies, I am ultimately alone with my body in this experience. There is no one to feel it with me—the sharp muscular aches in my lower abdomen that come out of nowhere while I’m watching a movie or the painful heaviness of my breasts that now greets me first thing every morning. My husband has no physical symptoms in “our” pregnancy, another reminder of how different a woman and man’s experience of life can be.
I’d like her to team up with Betty Gilpin, please, and just churn out an entire literary journal.
But in proper EmRata fashion, what we see above of her outfit is not all there is:
Honestly, I almost sighed with relief. We talk so much about whether a return to “normal” is ever possible, much less when, so I have to claw at the little things when I can. And knowing EmRata is still committed to a cutout feels like crawling underneath a warm weighted blanket and letting it lull me to a contented sleep.
