I haven’t told anyone this, but I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when the egg inside of me was fertilised. I was in Japan, in the Ginza district. It was after lunch, it was on a Sunday, Chuo-Dori Street was closed and I was walking right down the middle of it. It was the closest I have ever been to feeling like I was living in a science-fiction universe. After that, my mind became fixated on what was happening in my body. Every beverage I drank, every onsen [hot spring bath] I dipped my naked body into, every sea creature I ate, I wondered: Could that have affected the zygote? I started thinking, with each breath I took, that I was multiplying.

To keep this a secret for the first few weeks was excruciating. But what if this new part of me died and I had to explain to people that I wouldn’t actually grow another human… or become a new person? I started recognising that parts of women were dying all the time, all over the world, if they were trying to create life. 

The transformation exhausted me. After all, the cogwheels were spinning, exhausts fuming: production pulled full force ahead. And if I was meant to be this ill at ease, why wouldn’t the nausea just make me throw up? Didn’t this (it?) want to be in my body? What was happening? All I knew was that in these early weeks, sleep took hold anywhere gravity would have me. 

Time passed and limbs formed, eye sockets moulded, nails grew. Hey you.

The baby began to take space and pushed aside and around my organs like it was rearranging furniture. The baby was certainly moving in. I can’t say it was pleasant on the first floor, if we asked my pelvis. I kept wondering: If the baby was getting bigger, was I naturally getting smaller? If I had named the baby, was it aware of me – the person I was before they arrived? Was I even of value before they moved in?

I didn’t understand what was happening but where could I have gone to talk about it? Society felt too real to fathom my surreal state.

Once the baby’s arrival was evident to the outside world, I began to carry the smugness of pregnancy. I treaded lightly around the friends who couldn’t have children but wanted to or ignored the protruding bump around friends who weren’t sure if they wanted to become parents. And yet the metamorphosis of the body remained a trip. Certain days or weeks, I wanted to run away as much as I wanted to run towards the expansion, the grotesque, the (forever) largeness of it all. The baby told me their appetite and I listened. The baby was my future, and yet they tapped into my past like a magician. I was reminded of my childhood and every memory of parental neglect suggested to me that I may not be strong enough to pull through. Something darker was asking to be evoked. 

A word from my childhood abruptly reappeared and flickered in front of my eyes – miffo, me-pho, from the Swedish missfoster: a missed foetus, a failed one, a failure, a monster – such a monstrosity you are – a freak. It was almost ironic how the thing that kids called me at school now felt fitting in my constantly growing state. I was a freak. And where do freaks go?

I went on many long walks searching for something. Sometimes, as an interruption, the outside world came butting in.

“I just have to tell you,” said some random jogger on the street “that from the back you don’t even look pregnant.” And then she continued her run.

“Don’t worry,” I told the hill below my chest, “I’m not going to let anyone tell me how to mother.”

During one of my many walks and arriving closer to the end of the pregnancy, I started daydreaming of a place where I could go and mother where the idea of motherhood isn’t fraught. No judgment or performance would take place here. Feel free to come with me. Let’s have our cake, eat our cake, ignore our cake or put our face in the cake if we want to. I can hold your baby while you have your cake.

Miffo would smear the cake all over her body, then lick her fingers.

But there is no such place. There never will be such a place.

The baby expanded and stretched out until they were ready to make me burst. And yet, I still believed I was myself and would remain myself after they somehow (magically?) left my body and became separate from me. Where did the ‘I’ go when the body took over?

I gave birth. I tried to heal. 

In the healing process came the dark recollections, bubbling up and interfering. Who knew that giving birth could also crack open old trauma? Does the body store this memory somewhere? Does it decide when a memory needs to return? The birth somehow knew to pry it open and every crusty old sexual assault brushed back up against my stretched skin. Surprise! There those memories were again, subtly intruding like uninvited visitors. In my newly sleep-deprived state, all I could do was cry.

Because I experienced all this pain internally, it was easy for shame to creep in and take hold around my ankles. A choir of tiny little demons positioned themselves around my feet, singing some tune about how unfit, how inadequate, how weak I was in this new role as a mother. 

I didn’t seek help, professional or private. I barely told my husband, and yet he somehow knew once I started consoling myself through writing.

When I wasn’t writing, he was holding me, and I was holding the baby. And we have been comforting Miffo ever since. 

The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar is out now, published by Oneworld 

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

Images: Ben Mistak