That Baby Will Cost You

Abstract

This personal narrative highlights an intended ambivalent pregnancy, speaking to Sotirin’s call for radical specificity in mother-writing. The author began writing in a creative nonfiction workshop from memory fragments, diary entries, interviews, and scholarly research recognizing the story contained secrets, omissions, places she can’t remember, and places that are still in shadow that ethically need to stay closed. The use of creative nonfiction frames the story as a series of marginalized discourses from a relational dialectics perspective, in particular ambivalence (vs. certainty), bodily knowledge (vs. medicalization, vs. middle-class pregnancy), and flux (vs. cost–benefit ratios). The problem is that these marginalized discourses are not well represented in the totalizing picture of the pregnant lady. The story works as a performance text to transform totalizing oppressive discourse into a restructured aesthetic moment.