Self-Portrait at Six Months Pregnant

Katie Bennett

CREATIVE NONFICTION

As soon as six weeks my breasts swelled, my nipples darkened. My baby not even the size of a pea. 

I hadn’t expected pregnancy to be such an immediate possession. Even if I couldn’t see my baby in the shape of my belly, her cells and spirit enlarged the veins across my chest, cramped my stomach, inhibited me from eating raw vegetables. 

My teardrop, my grain of salt—she tore through me, begging to be seen. 

*

My first trimester, after I vomited on the wall next to the bathroom, my husband Francis grabbed a bucket and paper towels as I sunk down to the floor. He scrubbed my mess, my lunch—black streaks of salad greens, red starbursts of lentils. I clutched my head and panted. I made low, animal noises. The overhead light hurt my eyes so I closed them, and in the darkness I tunneled into a woolen landscape of suspended time. I wasn’t in Philadelphia, or even on Earth. I wasn’t a woman. I was pure feeling, dark purple. 

*

When I was six weeks pregnant Francis and I decided to take a weekly picture of my body, a ritual we still manage as I move through my sixth month. We use a cheap automatic camera I found at a thrift store. Neither of us know much about photography, apertures, or the schematics of light. 

On Sundays or Tuesday evenings—whenever we remember—I peel off my clothes and press my back against the cold wall in my tiny studio room. Francis sets a tripod on my desk. For the first few months I was barely awake, barely a body, as the camera’s flash illuminated my changing shape.

By taking a photo, I remained a writer, even if I couldn’t write. I’d anticipated a bit of exhaustion and nausea in pregnancy but not the suspension of my intellectual capabilities. Before work, after work, I was in bed. No TV. Eyes closed, even podcasts gave me a headache. I’d never done so little. Just lie. Sometimes just stare out the window, watching birds shit from telephone wires and listening to men unload cases of Budweiser at the beer store next door.

Time, those early months, moved quickly. Its texture cottony, thick. Dust glinted in sunbeams. Francis came in and out of our bedroom, sometimes lying down beside me, cradling my back. Our cat paced across my head. Sometimes I didn’t even register her until she poked her wet pink nose against mine. 

*

I study a photo of Annie Wang, lying on her couch, propped up by pillows. She’s wearing a white robe and her legs are bare and crossed at the ankle. She holds a pretzel stick against her stomach, her hand limp. Her face is turned away from the camera, eyes closed. In the foreground is a coffee table, almost entirely obscured by detritus: old newspapers, half-empty containers of crackers, used tissues, stray wires, crumpled papers, lotion. The table stands on a stained rug, next to a full trash can and a pair of cheetah-print slippers. 

The photo is from Wang’s 2001 series, Depressed Pregnancy, of which she wrote: 

“A large number of images of motherhood

expressing the ideal of virtue sacrificed created a whirlpool,

pulling me into a helpless situation.” 

Wang’s couch photo is the only photo from her collection that features her full body. Most are of her apartment and its disorder: her nightstand with its candy wrappers, her kitchen counter crowded with soiled dishes, her writing desk stacked with laundry. Wang writes that through pregnancy she felt “sealed in the domestic sphere” and like she was “disappearing.” 

*

Retroactive snapshot of a woman at work in her first trimester:

On a Tuesday at 3 p.m. she’s on her knees in the public restroom, grasping the sticky toilet bowl as her lunch burns its way back through her throat. Her gag reflex is further activated by smells of piss and fake floral perfume, acrid industrial pink hand soap full of harmful toxins. The bathroom tiles are cold. Their moisture seeps through her leggings. 

Her tits throb, her stomach cramps. She’s sobbing, both at the pain and the indignity, the invisibility, how she’s forced to hide her sickness as if it’s a personal shame rather than biological fact or societal imperative. Through pregnancy, wasn’t she finally being an acceptable woman? She’s forgotten her joy, how many years she’d longed for this child. 

How to make it through the day? She pulls out her phone and looks up the name for pregnancy-related depression: perinatal depression. She looks up how late you can get an abortion in Pennsylvania. She pulls up the online forums and is reminded she is not the only person in this position. Women she will never meet encourage each other, tell each other they are strong. Their words keep her going. 

She wipes her mouth with a hunk of toilet paper. 

*

After a break-up, after four days on a bender, pissing and bleeding on her sheets, Tracey Emin got up, drank some water, and stared at her bed, at what she called the “absolute mess and decay of my life.” She had a vision of the bed in a big white space—a gallery. In 1999, her installation My Bed became a media sensation.

Both My Bed and Annie Wang’s Depressed Pregnancy feature food waste, used tissues, stains, and slippers. Both are laced with sexuality, Wang’s through including “pregnancy” in the collection’s title, and Emin’s in its objects: used condoms, lube, pregnancy tests. Both were made in moments of crises, in sickness, and on the verge of colossal transformation. 

My Bed became an iconic, if polarized, symbol of heartbreak and resilience—themes that are the manna of the world’s most acclaimed songs, movies, and literature. In 2014 it sold at auction for over 2.5 million pounds. It’s hard to imagine pregnancy being perceived as seriously, as a moment of considerable existential upheaval. The only information I can find on Annie Wang’s Depressed Pregnancy series is on her website, which I must have my internet browser translate from Chinese to English. 

*

Second trimester, I began to walk around carrying three entities—myself, my unborn child, and the spectacle of my belly. 

At work someone told me I was looking “pokey.” A coworker reached out both arms and mimed squeezing me. 

With the newfound attention on my changing body I was brought back to puberty and the awkwardness of publicly growing breasts and hips earlier than my peers, of feeling overwhelmed by the painful and mysterious changes taking place across my skin. As a ten-year-old, I’d cross my arms over my chest or wear T-shirts over my bathing suits. Suddenly, at work, I felt more comfortable wearing oversized sweaters, even when I wasn’t cold. 

*

A little over four months into my pregnancy, I started to feel more alert, I had more energy. Everyone said this would happen but I didn’t believe them, couldn’t imagine leaving the long tunnel of my sickness. Around week 16, I stopped puking regularly. Week 18 my low-grade fever broke and my muscles stopped aching. I chatted easily with Francis after work instead of heading straight to bed. I laughed at his jokes. 

I told my mom over the phone that I was feeling much better, that I could finally eat fairly normally. She said, Just be careful not to eat too much. You don’t want to get too big. You don’t want to get stretch marks.

*

I compulsively googled the price of “mommy makeovers.” I bookmarked several pages. In “before” pictures, postpartum women’s stomachs hung below their underwear lines. “After,” they were taut but the skin was still soft, still slightly rippled. There is no reversing time, whether or not you have a child. 

*

Second trimester, I followed YouTube prenatal yoga videos in a corner of our bedroom. In our full-length mirror I watched myself lunge and squat, my thighs taut and strong, my arms long and graceful in warrior pose. My T-shirt stretched across my steadily growing belly, a centimeter larger each week. 

After one video, I picked up my film camera—tiny, silver, and thrifted—and positioned myself in the mirror. I took off my shirt and pants. In the mirror, I was not afraid of my skin stretching or my breasts sagging. I wasn’t worried about people thinking I was bloated or fat. I was curious about my evolution. 

I took a picture, holding the camera beneath my chin. By twenty weeks my belly presses out in a uniform half-oval, like someone’s placed a shield over my core. The linea nigra, a light brown line brought on by increased hormones, juts down crookedly from the left side of my belly button to my pelvis. My belly button, normally a deep “innie,” has flattened into a purple star, while my brown dot of a birthmark is still prominent on its right—my body still mine. In the frame, you can also see my guitar propped against the side of my wooden dresser and the long tendril of a houseplant. My cat naps behind me on a wool blanket from Barcelona, purchased by my mom while she was a student there in the ’70s. Out of frame, a tapered candle burns in a brass holder Francis gifted me, its beeswax smelling faintly sweet, its fire glinting in my gold jewelry. 

I loved this photo before I even saw it. 

*

In 1945, when she was five or six months pregnant, Diane Arbus also photographed herself in her bedroom mirror. Her belly is rounded, breasts cock-eyed, alive, nipples large and dark. She wears white underwear and stands with her legs slightly apart. With her right hand, she authoritatively grips the tripod that holds her boxy camera. Her left hand rests on top of her belly. Her head tilts to the side as if she’s asking a question or deep in study. Her daughter Doon was due in early April, like my daughter. 

Arbus later wrote to her lover that taking a photo is “maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything. . .” By taking a photo of her pregnant body, she wasn’t just documenting her transformation, but glorifying its possibilities. 

*

I google annie wang pregnant, searching for the artist’s acclaimed self-portrait. I’m surprised that in some thumbnails the photo appears blurred, overlaid with a warning: This image may contain explicit content. 

In the photo, Wang is pregnant, wearing a simple, even conservative, white cotton bra and underwear set. She’s sitting on a mattress, shoulders back, staring directly into the camera. Her big belly rests on her thighs. Darkened stretch marks, little lightning bolts, shoot down the side of her stomach. On the skin above them, in marker, she wrote, My Belly My Baby, her name in Chinese characters, and the date. The text appears upside down because it was written from her vantage point, for her eyes. 

The photo is from her 2001 series, I Sign; I Exist, in which she signed and dated her pregnant belly—the way an artist would a canvas—then photographed herself. The internet’s censoring this image, over twenty years later, is a reminder that the pregnant body is still taboo, dangerous. It isn’t the white cotton bra and underwear Wang is wearing that’s explicit, an underwear set easily seen on bodies populating department store catalogues and bus stop advertisements. It’s something about her belly, its prominence, and her gaze—unashamed. 

*

The first day of my third trimester, at a writing residency in Washington state, I walk into the private woods a few yards beyond the writers’ cottages. I’m going to photograph my naked body. 

On a mossy patch of trail I adjust the legs of a metal easel the office let me borrow. I place my camera on top, taping it down. It’s early afternoon, after lunch and the morning’s writing. It’s January, forty degrees and damp, a bit dim beneath the forest’s canopy. 

Through my camera’s viewfinder, toward the front of the frame, I spot a fallen tree branch. I plan to stand behind it—that way, my full body should be in the picture. I set the self-timer, something I’ve done a dozen times before, but never with so much at stake. A photograph always captures a singular moment in time, an unreturnable atmosphere, a body already older the second the shutter closes. And I don’t plan on being pregnant again. I will never have this much life in my body, two heartbeats. I will never look like this again, and what is it I’m trying to look like? What archetype? The wood nymph, the “Earth Mother,” totemic of fecundity. Back in the city I’d longed for an opportunity to be pregnant and naked in the woods. And here I am, freezing. 

I strip off my coat, my clothes. I have nowhere to put them so I drop them in the dirt. My bare feet immediately numb against the cold wet earth. I run to my spot on the trail and pose the way I’d practiced in the bathroom mirror, with mostly my left side to the camera, my body turned at a slight angle. Left hand on thigh, right hand on lower belly. Hair behind my shoulders, reaching down my back. Face placid, neutral. As I wait for the shutter to click my skin prickles pleasantly against the cool air. 

I take a few more photos, mostly posing in the exact same way. Then I take a few more. More. 

Over the next week I go out several more times, as the light changes, once with another writer who offers to help. More pictures must be better—more opportunities to find “the shot.” I wonder if my compulsion to take more photos isn’t so different from editing an essay—persistent effort in pursuit of truth and vibrant language. But I also know there’s something else stirring beneath my actions, something manic—a desire to overcome my perceived imperfections (my eye bags, my fleshy arms), a desire to crystalize my pregnancy in dewy mythology. And to control time, or to stop it, because I can’t write at the speed of pregnancy. Am I doing pregnancy right? If I take a picture I can decide later. 

*

Why film photography? A writer asks me this. Why film photography at a time when most of our cell phones are sophisticated digital cameras, when digital photography is free and immediate and offers a sense of control?

Film captures more textures and detail. Film is not fractured into pixels but can be blown up infinitely, it represents a more complete, human human being. Through film I feel more connected to the past, and threaded through a larger cultural story than the technological present.

Diane Arbus said that the camera contained power and “some slight magic” that transformed its subject. I don’t think she would have said the same of the cell phone camera. I think the magic is in the mystery, in waiting for the film to be developed, submitting to chance, sequestering control—like in pregnancy.

*

Flying home from the writing residency, I am 29 weeks pregnant—almost 7 months. I have one more picture left on my camera so I bring it into the tiny bathroom. 

My body knocks against the bathroom’s walls, my T-shirt sops up the sink’s sudsy rim. I turn to my side. My belly is its own planet now. I feel my girl wriggle against my organs, swimming through sky. Swimming toward me. The photo won’t capture her momentum but I’ll remember. I click the shutter.

---

Katie Bennett is a writer and musician based in West Philadelphia. She’s published work in Lit Hub and Salmagundi and received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Monson Arts. She also spent a decade touring North America and Europe with various bands and her songwriting has been featured in Pitchfork, SPIN, Rolling Stone, and NPR. More at www.katiepbennett.com

Her first book, She Was Wild Grass, will be released by Brink Books Fall 2026.

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