Eva starts her newsletter with a visual description of a sleepy trip to and from the fridge. It becomes clear that lemon flavored sparkling water, marrow bones and chocolate flavored soy milk are her current cravings. She also experiences the smells in the house intensely. “I swear to you, being pregnant is a trip. And sometimes a little agony too.”
For example, pregnant Eva is currently struggling with the long and high stairs at work. “When no one is looking, I hold my breasts on my way up and down because they hurt so much.” That’s not the only physical ailment: “Nausea washes up in waves, then powerfully, then whining in the background again. I’m dog tired. Gravity regularly gets too much for me and I end up napping on the concrete floor with the thin, not clothes too fresh. I’m so tired I don’t care.”
Last Friday, Eva reveals to her a womancolleagues that she is pregnant. “My colleagues and I spend more intense hours together in a day than we do with our families and loved ones, and they didn’t know the most important thing that was going on in my life.” That she has to keep such news quiet for a long time touches something deeper with Eva.
Period, tampons, her growing belly: the presenter feels she has had to hide a lot in her life. She also refers to her crying on her talk show: “I think of all the times hormones colored my day, how they made me extra sensitive to the sadness of others, to images of children, to melancholy. How hard I had to pull out all the stops to suppress that, make it manageable and broadcastable.”
Eva continues: “I think of everything else women hide: the miscarriages, the infertility, the pain of ailments like endometriosis, menopause. Normal life, so to speak.” She concludes by fantasizing about a daughter: “Maybe I will have a daughter now and she will grow up in a world where it will become more normal not to hide normal life anymore.”