My mom died 10 years ago this Election Day and I'm pregnant with my first child
I never expected to find myself in this situation. I’d prepared myself for every outcome but this one: First, I expected that I wouldn’t get pregnant, especially not naturally.
This Election Day will be a big one for me personally: It’s exactly the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death, I’ll be six months pregnant with my first child, and our rabidly partisan politics will have everyone talking as though being born or dying is less important than whether your team wins the White House.
I found out I was pregnant the same day as former President Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts. I heard the heartbeat for the first time the same day as President Biden’s disastrous debate performance. I started writing this piece the same day as Trump’s assassination attempt.
What a world I get to tell my kid about. What a decade my mom missed.
I’m glad, before the birth of my first, that I wrote a book ("I Used to Like You Until," out in September, available for pre-order now!) telling him or her how not to view the world and those who live in it — that is, through a binary lens.
It’s something my mother also taught me… or, more accurately, showed me. A woman who was such a walking example of Impossible-to-Categorize that I once overheard the nurses at the hospital where she died describe her as "that lady, the one with all of the pictures of the pope and the dick jokes."
I never expected to find myself in this situation. Actually, I’d prepared myself for every outcome but this one: First, I expected that I wouldn’t get pregnant, especially not naturally. Once I did, I expected that I’d probably miscarry. I mean, I am 35, which makes mine a geriatric pregnancy, medically speaking. If you listen to some of the dudes in the comments section, you’d be shocked a 35-year-old woman found anyone to have sex with her at all!
Finding out I was pregnant was also nothing like I thought it would be. In my imagination, I would wake my husband, who would sit up abruptly, look at the test, and be overwhelmed by this life-changing moment, leading us into a passionate embrace that we’d remember for the rest of our lives.
The reality? I had a hard time waking him up, and when I finally did rouse him, he said he couldn’t really see the line and rolled back over to sleep.
For me, too, it was less of an arresting moment, and more of a slow realization: The line kept getting darker. Then a blood test confirmed it. Then a week went by, and then another. We heard the heartbeat for the first time, and then we heard it again. It was never this exciting emotional rush of OMG, WE’RE GOING TO BE PARENTS!!!! Because I was far too aware of all the things that could go wrong to become intoxicated by such an impassioned reaction.
There was also something else working against the possibility of me experiencing all-encompassing astonishment, and that was, well, I was just too damn tired.
Before I got pregnant, I’d heard that the first trimester could be "exhausting," and I thought I could imagine what that might feel like. I have, after all, always pushed the limits of physical possibility. I frequently work for weeks on end without a single day off, including many instances when my touring and television schedules have left me time for just three hours of sleep three nights in a row. On the flip side, I’ve also been one to come home from nights out long past the sunrise. I’ve been both the person heading out to work and the person heading home from the club at the hours when the city sees those two groups of people meet.
Those two scenarios may seem to conflict, but they have one thing in common: The exhaustion that they left me with was a physical manifestation of things I loved about myself: The Hardest Working Woman I Know, The Most Fun Girl at the Party. Both had always been intrinsic to my identity, and I’d worn them as a badge of honor.
But pregnancy exhaustion is worse. I’ve had insomnia my entire life, with fears about the future racing through my brain as I desperately try to fall asleep. These days, I’m literally always ready for a nap — even though I might have more to be afraid of now than ever. Like, I’m about to have a baby, and I don’t even know how to hold one!
Before pregnancy, the exhaustion was proof that I was hardworking and fun. Now, as a pregnant woman, I fear I will never be those things again. I see every break I need from work as a sign that I’ve gotten too soft. I see every time I need to decline an invitation because I’m too tired as a sign that I’ve gotten too boring. I fear that I’m losing the exact things I've loved about myself for so long… and all of this only compounded by the realization that it’s not like life’s gonna get any easier once there’s a little dumb human living outside of me that I’m responsible for keeping alive.
It can be really, really hard, and I can be really, really hard on myself. I’m not cut out for this. I’m not any good anymore. I’m lazy. Let me tell you, early pregnancy will have you waking up after a full night of sleep feeling like you just spent 37 straight hours partying in Berlin, not only in terms of exhaustion, but also in terms of emotional stability… that is, having absolutely none at all.
There were moments that I felt so tired and so hopeless that I would just completely break down crying and say: I can’t do this.
So why did I allow myself to get knocked up, even though it’s so embarrassing to get pregnant by a man? For one thing, my husband just absolutely rules as a dude. I never wanted kids before I met him, but meeting him made me feel like it could actually be a cool thing to do. Part of it was feeling like something was missing in my life. Part of it was simply that I was curious. Part of it was that, well, I low-key felt like I had done everything else already. Part of it was, as ridiculous as this sounds, I thought that it would be funny. Not that the baby is a bit — like, except for in the way that everything kind of is, but you know what I mean — but more so that I know there would be lots of laughs along the way, and laughing is my favorite thing about being alive.
Every reason to have a child sounds kind of selfish, doesn’t it? Oh, I was kind of depressed and empty, so I decided to create a whole other human being… forcing them to enter a world where they’ll face these exact torments themselves! But then you’re also called selfish if you don’t have children. The only way around it, it seems, is to be, well, a man.
Anyway! I’m sure that women who have been pregnant before are probably reading this like, "Yeah, bro. I felt bad too; you’re not special." But my point in writing all of this is not that I think I’m some kind of unique victim. It’s the opposite!
I feel a sense of unity and solidarity with all the women who have gone through this. If I’m being honest, though, I also feel sadness about there being one woman in particular whom I’ll never be able to share this connection with: my mom.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited to be pregnant. I’m lucky to be able to do this, and to do it as part of a relationship that has given me the kind of happiness, security, and peace I once doubted could have ever been possible for me.
Still, it’s felt cruel, at times disorienting, and a bit unfair to have to try and figure out how to be a mother when I can hardly remember what it’s like to have one. It’s not that I don’t remember her, of course. It’s just that, after Nov. 5, 2014, everything I’ve done, I’ve done without her. I got my job at Fox News without a mom. I got into and out of a seriously abusive relationship with a narcissist without a mom. I became a New York Times bestselling author without a mom. I got married without a mom.
Ten years later, I am an entirely different person — which is a great thing, as anyone who somehow endured the 20-something version of me will tell you. But the fact that I don’t recognize this person from the past is also to say I don’t recognize the last version of myself that will ever be a person with a mother.
Ten years is a long time. The fact that it’s really been that long will be at the top of my mind this Nov. 5… all as The Discourse pretends that the only thing worth considering will be the election.
But guess what? The fact that I’ll have something else on my mind on that day also doesn’t make me a unique victim. Many people will have things on their minds that aren’t politics.
I do want to acknowledge that Election Day is probably a little easier for me, politically speaking, because I count myself among the millions of Americans who are independent. I am not a Democrat or a Republican, but I do have meaningful relationships with both.
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One underlying theme in the new book is the way that politics makes us fight with the people we actually know on behalf of people who don’t even know we exist. As I write in its introduction: "All too often, we will let a single difference in viewpoint or association be enough to write off another person entirely, even if we know nothing else about them." Worse? Politicians weaponize this division for the sake of their own power at the expense of our relationships with each other.
I’ve faced this firsthand quite a few times. In fact, you might have done it to me as you’ve been reading! Perhaps, my admission that I’m not in either party has angered you, because you think I’d have to be an idiot to not be in yours. There are others still who will see that this piece is on FoxNews.com and think that tells them enough to know that they don’t want to click on it at all.
I’m not, of course, saying that politics doesn’t impact our lives. It absolutely does! But we also shouldn’t invent unnecessary impacts based on incorrect assumptions.
The stuff that transcends politics, and why it’s so important to transcend politics, is what my new book is about. It’s also something that I also hope to bring to my project after that, which will be, of course, the kid. I want my child to realize, for example, that a woman having a room full of pictures of the pope doesn’t mean she won’t also have some great dick jokes.
And if you’re tempted to judge me for using my pregnancy to sell books? Well, first of all, you read this for free, and I wrote this for $0. Second, babies are expensive, especially in New York City… and also, if it doesn’t sell well, I’ll see it as devastating confirmation of my lifelong fear that I can’t be a mother and a woman with a thriving career at the same time.
And if you’re tempted to judge me for using my mother’s death? Be careful about judging what you don’t know. Because, chances are, you didn’t know her, and even if you did, you probably still don’t know what she said to me on her deathbed, something I can still hear her say this entire decade later:
"Katherine, milk this as long as you can."
Pre-order Kat's new book and get tickets to her live shows here.