Then I Got Pregnant : Why It Took So Long To Make This Album, Part Three

I loved being pregnant. There are quite a few women who hate being pregnant, and they’ll try to convince you that people like me don’t exist, but oh, I do. I was terribly romantic about the whole thing - creating life, carrying a precious new soul inside my belly, never being alone. All my thoughts, all my songs, all my tears, I was sharing with someone else. There’s this sappy little quote for mothers, about how children are the only ones who know how your heart sounds from the inside, but it was more than that to me - my child was hearing my songs from the inside. I wrote so many love songs while I was pregnant, and I loved that my baby was getting to hear the creation of music. Not just the practiced rehearsal of things complete, but the slow train of thoughts, the formation of melodies, the repetition, reaching a new, farther place each time through, until we wrote ourselves an end.

Further, I loved people offering me glasses of water and telling me to sit down and relax all the time. I read and re-read my favourite Sylvia Plath passages about pregnancy and childbirth, and I lived with those words in my mind all the time. “I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.” (I feel my eyes prickle, remembering.) I felt good most of the time, and I played more gigs in those 9 months than in any other 9 month span in my life, before or after. It wasn’t without its challenges - it was hard to play gigs in restaurants in the first trimester when I was nauseous, I couldn’t lift my own gear after a certain point, the swelling gave me carpal tunnel (which fortunately didn’t affect my guitar playing), and I was gaining more weight than I wanted to - but the love and kindness had made those months the happiest of my life so far. My husband or my friend Dan came to all of my gigs to help with my gear, and my mother rubbed my hands and feet endlessly on her visits to me.

Six months pregnant and performing at the Oliver Goldsmith Takeover, Walkerville Optical, March 2018.

I thought I’d have the time to work on my album, but no. I needed to work like crazy to save money for my maternity leave. There is “maternity leave for self-employed people” in Canada through Employment Insurance, but it would cost me more money than I’d receive, because I’d have to pay EI on all of my future earnings for the rest of my career, in exchange for maybe a couple hundred bucks after the baby was born… I wasn’t THAT desperate.

Our daughter arrived in May 2018, three weeks ahead of schedule, two days after my last gig, and then, of course, everything stopped for a while, except the bits of work I had to do to keep making money - custom songwriting, especially the commissions I hadn’t had time to finish before she was born, and gigs here and there, once the baby was a little older and I could go out for a few hours at a time.

She grew like crazy, outgrew her bassinet in just a couple months, and we had to set up a crib in the bedroom of our tiny apartment. Quickly, our place was bursting at the seams. It was a Feng shui nightmare - bulky items all shoulder-to-shoulder across every single wall of every single room. We needed to move out.