Bringing Up Bebe Read Online Free PDF Page A

represent potential SAT points. Never mind hunger: if I find myself short a protein portion at the end of the day, The Pregnancy Diet says I should cram in a final serving of egg salad before bedtime.
    They had me at “diet.” After years of dieting to slim down, it’s thrilling to be “dieting” to gain weight. It feels like a reward for having spent years thin enough to nab a husband. My online forums are filled with women who’ve put on forty or fifty pounds over the recommended limits. Of course we’d all rather resemble those compactly pregnant celebrities in designer gowns or the models on the cover of
FitPregnancy
. A few women I know actually do. But a competing American message says that we should give ourselves a free pass. “Go ahead and EAT,” says the chummy author of the
Best Friends’ Guide to Pregnancy
, which I’ve been cuddling up with in bed. “What other joys are there for pregnant women?”
    Tellingly, The Pregnancy Diet says that I can “cheat” with the occasional fast-food cheeseburger or glazed donut. In fact, American pregnancy can seem like one big cheat. Lists of pregnancy cravings seem like a catalog of foods that women have been denying themselves since adolescence: cheesecake, milkshakes, macaroni and cheese, and Carvel ice-cream cake. I crave lemon on everything, and entire loaves of bread.
    Someone tells
me that Jane Birkin, the British actress and model who built a career in Paris and married the legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg, could never remember whether it was Ceth MT “un baguette” or “une
baguette,” so she would just order “deux baguettes” (two baguettes). I can’t find the quote. But whenever I go to the bakery, I follow this strategy. Then—surely unlike the twiggy Birkin—I eat them both.
    I’m not just
losing my figure. I’m also losing a sense of myself as someone who once went on dinner dates and worried about the Palestinians. I now spend my free time studying late-model strollers and memorizing the possible causes of colic. This evolution from “woman” to “mom” feels inevitable. A fashion spread in an American pregnancy magazine, which I pick up on a trip back home, shows big-bellied women in floppy shirts and men’s pajama bottoms, and says that these outfits are worthy of wearing all day. Perhaps to get out of ever finishing my book, I fantasize about ditching journalism and training as a midwife.
    Actual sex is the final, symbolic domino to fall. Although it’s technically permitted, books like
What to Expect
presume that sex during pregnancy is inherently fraught. “What got you into this situation in the first place may now have become one of your biggest problems,” the authors warn. They go on to describe eighteen factors that may inhibit your sex life, including “fear that the introduction of the penis into the vagina will cause infection.” If a woman does find herself having sex, they recommend a new low in multitasking: using the moment to do Kegel exercises, which tone your birth canal in preparation for childbirth.
    I’m not sure that anyone follows all this advice. Like me, they probably just absorb a certain worried tone and state of mind. Even from abroad, it’s contagious. Given how susceptible I am, it’s probably better that I’m far from the source. Maybe the distance will give me some perspective on parenting.
    I’m already starting to suspect that raising a child will be quite different in France. When I sit in cafés in Paris, with my belly pushing up against the table, no one jumps in to warn me about the hazards of caffeine. To the contrary, they light cigarettes right next to me. The only question strangers ask when they notice my belly is “Are you waiting for a child?” It takes me a while to realize that they don’t think I have a lunch date with a truant six-year-old. It’s French for “Are you pregnant?”
    I am waiting for a child. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve ever