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Task 43 - The Banality of Pregnancy

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Alan
Tasks
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Alan writes:

You wrote in Task 42: ‘Why should I have to feel isolated and alone in my pregnant body?’ I wondered what you meant and asked. Weren’t you getting enough hugs? Did I need to listen better? You answered that you lacked a community to discuss the experience of your pregnancy. Not, you said, that you didn’t have willing interlocutors (me and your mother, for example), but that you felt like you were imposing or oversharing if you discussed the trivial (the word you used was ‘banal’) details of the emotional and physical experience of pregnancy.

This task is an invitation to dwell on and express those banal details. I hope you can build on the activity of note-taking, using the Notes Plus app, in your last couple of responses, to record the ordinary and evolving experience of your pregnant body over the coming week: fatigue, hunger, elation, sensation, whatever. But I want to challenge you to go beyond mere diary/record to give your notes some form. In your instructions for Task 38 you write that you liked how I employed simple parameters in my own Response 28 to give a satisfying shape to my London travelogue. Can you arrive at a similarly satisfying form while, or thereby, being true to your experience of pregnancy?

See Marie’s response here.