***Originally posted 1/23/15***

So this article from Scary Mommy popped up on a friend’s Facebook wall today and it made me really want to write this post about my own experience with pregnancy. I thought I knew “what to expect” when it came to pregnancy. Not just the societal ideals and pop culture memes, but on a more thought out level because not only had I read the entire What to Expect When You’re Expecting book before I was even thinking about having children, I read it in service of working on my graduate thesis

In case you can’t see, that’s a paper fetus from when I played pregnan Helena… Photo by Woods Pierce from All’s Well That Ends Well directed by Linden Kueck

which dealt with staging pregnancy and pregnant characters in Shakespeare and how that highlights some gender issues we have as a society. I knew a lot of facts, but really:

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