The way people's brains work is always interesting. I always find it interesting how quickly a situation which is, by definition, temporary, comes to seem permanent. I was at Ashkelon for 7 weeks doing archaeology a few years ago, and in spite of the fact that I knew I'd be home in a few short weeks, and most of my mental energy was focused on going back home again, the little world of the Ashkelon excavation became my whole mental world within a few short days. The standardization of the days--up at the same time, doing the same things all day 6 days a week, quickly imprinted on my brain that this was the way things were now. Even though I knew it wasn't going to last that long in the scheme of things, the part of my mind that connects me to the actual reality right now either didn't know or didn't care. When I got back, it took an entire month to readjust--pretty close to as long as I'd been away. That whole month I felt incredibly disoriented and weird, often waking up in the middle of the night thinking I was at the site (rather than in my hotel room, oddly), and even in broad daylight, on some level questioning what I was seeing and who I was.
Right now, I can barely remember what it was like to not be pregnant. It's even hard to remember a time when I was not really BIG and pregnant, even though I've only been really BIG for less than two months. Occasionally, when the baby is really still, I sometimes feel back to normal and have to look down to make sure that my GIANT stomach is still there.
Even though I don't have an actual baby yet, and have yet to discover what that's like, it's really hard to remember what it's like to not have a baby. Sure, she's not out where I can see her, I'm not feeding her every 45 minutes or whatever and listening to her cry and vocalize, but she's there all right. She squirms, wriggles, kicks and dances pretty much all day long, and if I wake up in the night she's at it a lot of the time too. She gets caught on tables when I try to get up from my chair, she makes me waddle when I walk, she prevents me from fitting through narrow spaces, and she attracts looks and comments from pretty much everyone I see. When I think of what life was like before I got BIG, my existence seems shadowy, insubstantial and incorporeal. I could drift through crowds without notice, I could get right up next to my computer keyboard without sending its retractable shelf bouncing back under the desk.
By the time Baby gets here, it's going to be impossible for me to directly compare life without a baby to life with one. I've had this huge, long, transition time in which to adjust. My physical being has from the earliest days been transformed, and this transformation has become impossible to ignore for me and for everybody else. My thoughts about myself and interaction with the world has changed, and my social identity has changed, and never will change back.
This is of course characteristic of the liminal periods of life. Such situations aren't merely social constructs, however, at least with something like pregnancy they are social responses to biological realities. Pregnancy really is a "betwixt and between" time, not merely dangerous to social categories but is actually a time of danger to both mother and child, probably more dangerous to both than any other time of life. This is of course less the case now that I have practically continuous access to the best of modern medicine, but not even today the best doctors in the world can yet negate the vulnerability of pregnant women and fetuses.
The social responses to pregnant women today in West Michigan (baby showers, the social imperative of a positive response to a pregnant woman by strangers as well as friends and relatives), serve the same function as such practices in every society: to submerge the reality of this vulnerability underneath the well-wishes, prayers, and the development of a community of support, to ease the parents into their new roles with the material necessities for taking care of a baby.
I'm reading a book about childbirth that keeps going on about how labor is something you do in your body, not in your head. That's not a super-comfortable concept for me, I'm much more comfortable thinking things out thoroughly before, or instead of, actually doing things. Not really an option for childbirth. I've watched those videos and no amount of thinking is really going to help me much when push comes to shove (so to speak :).
Of course everybody is embodied and interacts with the world and thus has the ability to connect intellectual concepts with experience, but women are in a unique position to do so. The concept of liminality, as developed by the various super-smart male guys mentioned in the Wikipedia entry above, is a very intellectualized one. It could be benefitted by a connection between the abstract model of social abstractions and the physical, biological reality of experiencing adolescence, birth, death, and so forth. Van Gennep, Turner, et al did a lot of really good thinking about liminality, but I AM LIMINAL.
And BIG. Really, really BIG.