My Cryptic Pregnancy: I Was Five Months Pregnant and Had No Idea
I still feel the strangeness of that when I say it out loud. I was 20, travelling solo through Asia and Australia, still taking the contraceptive pill, and still very much living in my head.
Five months. A whole human growing inside a body I had absolutely no relationship with.
When I found out, I didn't feel shock. What I felt was something closer to confusion, like a deep disorientation. Like being told there's been music playing in the room you've been sitting in all along, and you just never heard it. How could I have missed this? How had my body been doing something so huge, so monumental and undeniable, while I was somewhere else entirely?
The answer I now understand, is that I had been taught to be elsewhere.
The only cycle I knew
At 20, this is what I understood about my body to be doing hormonally: 21 days of taking a pill, followed by a bleed. That was literally it.
I didn't know I wasn't ovulating, I didn't know the bleed I'd been calling my period was a withdrawal bleed. I didn't know there was an infradian rhythm, or inner seasons, or a whole architecture of hormonal intelligence moving through me month by month. No one had ever told me. And I had never thought to ask, because the pill had been handed to me so routinely as a 14 year old, as if it were just what you did with a female body at a certain age.
My body and the things that happened to it felt separate from me. Not really mine, exactly… just a vehicle. Something that carried me around while the real me lived somewhere above the neck.
What the pill does to body awareness
I now know that the pill does more than just prevent pregnancy (or not, in my case…), it can literally change how you experience yourself. Studies have shown differences in brain regions linked to emotional procession and interoception (your ability to feel what’s happening inside your body).
To be clear: I am not anti-pill. But I do strongly believe in informed consent, for women and girls being told the full picture of what they are agreeing to, because I didn’t have that.
Everything happening to me, nothing moving through me
Above: me, with my now noticeable bump, back in Thailand after finding out I was 5 months pregnant in Australia, spring 2014
When I found out I was pregnant, I was alone on the other side of the world. The rest of that pregnancy (and the birth) happened in a kind of sustained out-of-body state. Decisions were made for me and things happened to me. I moved through it all from a distance, like watching my own life through glass.
I didn't go back on the pill after that. But I want to be totally honest: that wasn't a conscious awakening at that point. It wasn't a decision rooted in wisdom or reclamation, I just didn't. And the disconnection continued for another four years.
In that time, I went to doctors. I described what I was feeling, the flatness, the anxiety, the sense of being slightly outside myself all the time. And what I was offered, repeatedly, was antidepressants or the pill. Those were the options. Looking back, I understand those doctors simply didn't have the tools to ask what I actually needed, but neither did I.
The first time I actually listened
I was 24 when things finally cracked open (albeit not in a way I'd have chosen or planned). I was in a relationship that was slowly hollowing me out, and I had hit the kind of rock bottom where something just had to give.
In what I can only describe as my accidental first silent retreat, I stopped speaking for two weeks, ate only whole foods and ended the relationship. And in that complete stillness – no noise, no numbing, no one else's needs pulling me away from the centre of myself – I could hear myself again. I didn't have the language for it then, but I had instinctively created the exact conditions my nervous system needed to finally hear itself.
That's when I started paying attention to my cycle, noticing that I felt different in different weeks. That there were patterns if I slowed down enough to see them.
By 25, I was tracking my cycle with Natural Cycles, taking my basal body temperature daily, and beginning to understand the rhythm I'd been moving to all along without knowing it. And then my lovely mum died suddenly. Shortly after, I discovered I was pregnant again.
It turns out that grief doesn’t respect your contraceptive app. The stress of losing her – the cortisol surge, the full-body impact of sudden loss – had shifted my ovulation in a way no app could have predicted. My body had moved the goalposts, as bodies do when they are surviving something enormous, and I had conceived at a point in my cycle I'd understood to be safe.
How grief moves ovulation
When the body perceives it is in danger (and grief is, to the nervous system, a state of profound threat) it may decide this is not a safe moment to reproduce, and it moves the timeline. The body is responding with extraordinary intelligence to what it perceives as its reality.
Above: silhouette of me at 6 months pregnant with my second babe, summer 2019
The second time, I knew
The difference between my two pregnancies is something I’ll never be able to fully put into words. The first: five months gone, no idea, a body I'd been absent from for years. The second: a matter of days, and I knew. Not even from a test, literally from the inside, from the texture of my own body, which I had spent a year learning to read, and which spoke to me now in a language I was finally, finally, starting to understand.
The birth healed something in me. Where the first had been something that happened to me – clinical, dissociated, observed from a distance – the second moved through me. I was inside my body for it, fully, completely inside and present. I felt every wave of it, as something I was actively part of. It was the most present I had ever been in my own skin, and I understood in those hours that this quality of presence was what had been missing not just from the first birth, but from most of my life.
And in the unravelling that followed, I began to truly comprehend just how far away I had been from myself five years earlier. It was the beginning of understanding what had been taken from me, and what was possible to reclaim.
The long, nonlinear way home
I am 33 now. I have been tracking my cycles and seasons for 8 years. And when I’m asked how I came to this work – to supporting women through the continuous transitions of their lives, from the monthly inner seasons to the full-body seasons of menarche and matrescence and menopause – this is the story I come back to.
Because the alarming thing is that it isn’t rare or extreme, it’s completely ordinary. Versions of this story are everywhere, women who were handed a synthetic cycle and told that was sufficient.
Who went to doctors with a body full of signals and were offered something to hush those signals down.
Who sat in front of someone who should have had answers, and were given a prescription instead of the tools to hear what their body was saying.
I sat in those chairs and I held those prescriptions in my hand and something, some small, stubborn voice in me knew that taking them would move me further from myself, not closer. That they would mask what my body was trying to say, rather than help me learn to listen. I am so grateful I followed that voice even when I didn’t fully understand it yet.
The person and practice I keep returning to is myself, my body, my cyclical nature. Because I have learned that the body is not a problem to be solved, it is an intelligent wisdom to be listened to, to be in relationship with, and it has been speaking all along.
I also know what it feels like to be a stranger in your own skin, but knowing deep in my bones that it doesn’t have to stay that way.
