Issue No. 2: The Self
I watched every single episode of 'Keeping Up With The Kardashians' while pregnant. Here's what I learned.
Fear is like carbon monoxide, a gas with no odor or color; invisible except for its consequences. Unnoticeable until you’re dizzy, wondering why your head hurts.
There are so many things to be afraid of when you’re pregnant. Will my baby be healthy? Can we afford this? Can I do this? It’s also completely taboo to say you’re afraid. The ideal woman is many things, but frightened is not one of them.
So when I found myself pregnant, paralyzed with questions about how this baby would change me—my work, my marriage, my body—how did I handle it? Did I turn inward, take up the challenge to investigate my selfhood on my own terms? Face my fears like Cheryl Strayed on the Pacific Crest Trail, adventure bravely like Elizabeth Gilbert in Bali?
Nope. I laid on the couch and numbed out. Drug of choice? ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians.’ I watched every single episode in nine months. Every single episode. 20 seasons, 15 years (2007-2021), +300 hours — I watched it all.
“Holy s***, why?!” you might be wondering. (I’m wondering that too.) At first it was just good fun: nothing will get me laughing like Kris Jenner taking care of a monkey, or Kim losing a $75,000 diamond earring in the ocean. But as I made my way through the seasons, I realized my motivations were more complicated.
My life had only questions and no answers. A high blood pressure reading landed me a trip to the hospital and a pre-eclampsia diagnosis. We lost our insurance coverage in the seventh month of my pregnancy, twice. A recession loomed over the U.S. economy, making our financial situation feel dangerously precarious. Things were… uncertain.
But in front of my TV, eyes locked on Kim K’s perfectly over-lined lips, I knew exactly what was to come—every marriage, divorce, affair, baby, bankruptcy and business venture. I knew it all. Here I was an expert, an anthropologist, an oracle, a God. With almost two decades of hindsight I could study their lives for warning signs, red flags they couldn’t see: Kris Humphries?! Why didn’t anyone see that coming? Did Kourtney and Scott ever have a chance? Could anyone have predicted Lamar Odom’s addiction? If I watched closely enough, maybe I could.
I’d found a reliable medicine for my fear, a Tylenol I could pop more than four times a day: Judgement.
Judgment offers a very handy form of self-preservation. The more we scrutinize other people, analyzing their success or failure, the more confident we feel about the uncertainty in our own lives.
Unfortunately, judgement cuts the other way too: the more we watch other people, the more we confuse their standards for our own.
The Kardashians have given birth to a total of 13 children on television, and not a single birth took more than an hour on camera to bounce back from. In one 2013 episode, Kim told Jonathan Cheban she lost more than 40 pounds after giving birth, and that number that is still bouncing around in my head. (40 pounds! I’ve got 39 to go.) As for stretch marks? Kim has those zapped off at a dermatologist. Acne, cellulite, loose skin? Of course those are taken care of too.
Should I book a dermatologist appointment? Do we have those kinds of lazers in Texas? Does everyone think I’m gross and disgusting? That’s the trouble with using other people’s lives to gauge our own: suddenly we can’t remember how we wanted to define success or failure in the first place.
Looking back, I wish I could have been gentler to myself during my pregnancy, given myself grace for all of that fear.
“It was a penetrating, relentless, unalterable thing, to be[come a] mother, my life ending and beginning at once,” Cheryl Strayed once wrote about giving birth to her first child. And wow, that’s worth being afraid of! Perhaps if we all got more comfortable with fear—talking about it, supporting our friends through it—we might not have so much judgement and shame.
For now, with my little daughter in my arms, I’ve turned my TV off. I canceled my Hulu subscription. No more Kardashians for me. It may be easier to define ourselves in relation to others, but what if we chose not to? In the few quiet moments I have, I’m returning to the truth of myself: the coffee I like to drink, the sunset I like to watch, the books I like to read.
As it turns out, my confidence is right where I left it.
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"Here I was an expert, an anthropologist, an oracle, a God." What a line!
Today I saw a TikTok of someone getting a rhinoplasty. The before was my nose's doppelgänger, the after a perfect ski slope. Was that helpful little video worth the satisfaction I was afforded judging the subjects of multitudes of other videos? Not really. Love the way you said it. "Judgement cuts the other way too."