I'm planning on telling my students on the first day of class that I'm pregnant just to get it out there, so that there'll be no speculation or anything like that. I won't be gigantic, but I think by the time classes start in a little over 3 weeks, the pregnancy will be somewhat noticeable. Anyway, I was just thinking about the prospect of telling my students, and for some reason I'm preoccupied/uncomfortable with the idea of my students thinking about my having sex. If being pregnant is anything, at its most basic and fundamental level, it's physical proof and a tangible manifestation of an undeniable fact: You had sex.
On one hand, it's ridiculous to care about that. Who cares? It's a part of being human, and my students aren't hormonal middle schoolers who giggle at anything even approximating the word "sex" (like when I taught ordinal numbers to 6th graders and they discovered that the way to say "I'm in the 6th grade" in Spanish is "Estoy en el sexto grado"). But still, the knowledge that your professor is a sexual being is weird. Not completely unlike when I was in grad school and my students were weirded out when they saw me riding the campus transit just like they did. You...ride the bus? When you're an educator, you're put in this non-human category, like, your life only exists in the classroom and if anything interferes with the schema of you existing in the classroom, the resulting cognitive dissonance is too much to bear. I don't want my students to view me in a weird way, and I most certainly don't want anyone to creepily ponder what I did (as if it were some sort of salacious crime) to end up this way (as if being pregnant were a way to "end up").
I guess I'm also concerned whether being a pregnant professor will affect my classroom authority as well as the perception of my competence as a professional and a scholar even more than it is already affected. Let's be honest, being young-looking, female and black at a predominantly white institution are already strikes against me as far as perceptions of gravitas are concerned. I enjoy where I am and I have been praised for my willingness to participate in the campus community and for engaging my students, but one of my needs-improvement areas is "rigor." Essentially, my grades are too high. I get it, grade inflation is a thing. I was already paranoid about being seen as an "easy professor" and in a way, my fears were confirmed. I don't want to be the prof that the kids love because I'm smiley and bubbly and upbeat, but don't make them work hard. What does being pregnant have to do with anything? On top of not wanting to be seen as "easy," I don't want to be seen as somehow unconcerned about professional advancement because I'm supposedly kicking back, having babies and am more focused on setting up a nursery than attaining tenure. To be fair, there are plenty of women at my institution who are successful professors and mothers. I'm glad that I'm at a place that is considered "family friendly" overall.
Nevertheless, my professional preoccupations notwithstanding, I am completely happy with accepting my most important job right now which is taking care of myself, having a healthy pregnancy and giving birth to a healthy baby. I can't believe that a week from today, we will find out the baby's gender. It'll be nice to finally refer to the baby as "he" or "she" rather than as a not-quite-human "it." We'll finally be able to refer to the baby with his or her name. I'm slowly starting to dip my toes into the baby product waters. My mom is champing at the bit to buy things for her first grandchild, so why not indulge her? I want one of those strollers you can just snap the car seat onto. No getting the baby out of the car seat or carrying that mamma jamma like a boulder attached to your hip. Snap off, snap on, let's go.
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