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By Allison Benedikt|Posted Saturday, March 3, 2012
If you ask a pregnant woman about pregnancy books, she will generally respond with some hand-waving variation of: "Oh, I don't read the books. They just make you crazy!" But contrary to our carefully cultivated pregnancy personas, expectant moms devour pregnancy advice. Late into the night. Down into the wormhole. And, with more than 17 million copies in print worldwide, plus untold millions being passed between sisters and friends, What To Expect When You're Expecting is still the mother of them all.
The origin story goes that, in 1984, expectant mom and advertising copywriter Heidi Murkoff, feeling let down and freaked out by the pregnancy books on the market, decided to write her own. Extreme nesting, perhaps, but the difference between her plan and your notion to knit your child’s entire home-from-the-hospital outfit is that she actually followed through. "Determined to write a guide that would help other expectant parents sleep better at night," per her bio, Murkoff delivered her book proposal just hours before delivering her first child, Emma. What? Yes. She wrote the proposal for the book all about pregnancy while pregnant with her first child. Three decades, four editions, countless spinoffs, and a notable uptick in Emmas later, 93 percent of American women who read a pregnancy guide read What To Expect, according to its publisher’s website.
The first time I was one of those women, I had two books on my bedside table, each reflecting my potential pregnancy personality: Midwifery guru Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, with stories of 72-hour natural homebirths and testaments to the benefit of deep kissing in labor, in case I turned out to be that person; and What To Expect When You're Expecting, in case I turned out to be myself. Reading Murkoff's advice back then—it didn't really frighten me. It consumed me, as did the pregnancy. When you are in it, you are really in it. And when you are really in it, you are in denial about what is actually going on. (Pro tip: The baby is not only going to come out, it's going to stay out.) So you sign up for an eight-week childbirth class, think about switching to decaf, feel guilty that you didn't switch to decaf, watch that Ricki Lake movie, develop philosophies about mom things, make your husband watch that Ricki Lake movie, quietly judge your friends' philosophies about mom things, buy a 20-class pass for prenatal yoga, go to yoga twice, and read (and re-read) a book that purports to tell you "what to expect" – all in order to focus your crazy-person energy on … something. But now that I've had the baby, and another one after that, the book that seemed perfectly normal, even essential, just four years ago, feels harsh, punitive, almost like parody today.
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