Last year, I had a baby. It was full of ups and downs. Parenting is one of the more challenging roles I have taken on in my life. As an mpreg reader and writer, though, going through pregnancy, birth, and now parenting, has had an interesting impact on what I prefer to read and write.
I Lost Interest in Mpreg
For the first few months after Baby arrived, I lost interest in mpreg. I don’t generally have any interest in “regular” preg (or f-preg for that matter). Mpreg has specifically been my wheelhouse for decades now.
Which made it all the stranger that undergoing pregnancy and childbirth myself made me shy away from the subject. For a few months after, if you look at my GoodReads, I gravitated toward books that didn’t include mpreg.
I still read it—probably one book a month. The strange part was that I didn’t enjoy these books. I was disinterested. It took me much longer than usual to finish these books, even when I was reading at a ridiculous pace I haven’t managed in probably the better part of two decades.
What was going on with that?
Experience Made Mpreg (Briefly) Lose Its Appeal
The previous curiosity I’d had regarding pregnancy and childbirth had been completely squelched by my own experience. So there was no sense of novelty or curiosity when I approached these stories. Before, I didn’t have direct experience, so I could only experience it through the stories. I was, in a sense, living vicariously through fiction.
Lived experienced changes one’s perception of fiction. We often talk about that in relation to how fiction by white writers gets the lived experience of being marginalized incredibly wrong, or how straight writers get queer experience wrong, or how male writers misunderstand and misrepresent female experiences.
Yet I also know that fiction represents an incredible range of experiences and scenarios—some of which I will never have the opportunity to experience. My queer experience is not the same as another person’s, which means my queer fictional worlds may not “ring true” for some queer people, even though they’re written by a queer person who has a queer lived experience.
The same is true for being female. I have certainly encountered books where I felt male writers captured a very feminine “experience” of the world and represented it well. So “writing outside your lane” can be done—and lived experience doesn’t necessarily need to line up one for one to enjoy fiction.
I Had a Traumatic Birth Experience
What was more likely putting the damper on my enjoyment of mpreg stories in my immediate postpartum period was the fact I had a traumatic experience. I was induced early, spent more than thirty hours in labor, and had to through an emergency C-section because the baby was stuck. The baby had been crosswise in my uterus, and no one clocked that before inducing me.
It still isn’t exactly pleasant to think about this. So when I was engaging with fiction that had characters getting pregnant and giving birth, it was dredging up my own experience—which I didn’t want to engage with at the time.
I wasn’t not enjoying the stories—I was disassociating while I was reading, which I interpreted as being disinterested.
That also contributed to the slower reading speed; it also meant I was avoiding those stories, because they were triggering.
That … is a huge problem for someone who reads and writes mpreg on the regular.
Time Heals All
The further I get from the immediate postpartum period, the easier it is to engage with mpreg stories. (In fact, my entire November reading list was mpreg stories, and I’ve started writing my own again.)
This isn’t exactly unusual or unpredictable. I had a traumatic experience, which I needed to process. Time, generally, is one of the biggest factors in processing. So immediately after giving birth, I couldn’t handle mpreg stories. Now, nearly a year removed from the event, I’ve had the time and space to process it enough to make reengaging with mpreg more pleasant. Time has also blunted the memories—or, at the very least, I’ve been able to do what my husband calls a “memory dump” and forgotten them, at least to some extent. That often happens when people experience trauma; one of the common reactions to trauma is actually to bury the memories.
I wouldn’t say I have post-traumatic amnesia. The memories have not been suppressed, but they’re not sharp. I couldn’t tell you much about the pain. Well, it hurt. But I can’t tell you exactly how it ached or hurt.
By contrast, I can tell you the exact feeling of having dental surgery when I was twelve. I had permanent teeth extracted from beneath the gum, and the dental team didn’t give me enough freezing. I could feel them digging under the gum. And I can still viscerally feel that. It gives me a whole body reaction; I feel sick thinking about it.
Humans Are Made to Forget Pain
Pain is one of those things that we tend to forget with time. Labor and delivery is particularly something that tends to fade in memory (otherwise people would only have one baby ever). Yet I can tell you all about that traumatic dental surgery, which happened many years ago. On the other hand, I can barely tell you about the C-section, which happened less than a year ago.
So, the memory has faded, which has allowed me to move forward from the trauma. In turn, I’ve been more and more able to reengage with mpreg stories.
I’m still skipping over some of the details, such as birth scenes. I haven’t written one of those postpartum yet, and I’m definitely still skimming them in the stories I’m reading. But I will say I’m enjoying the stories more.
Getting Back to Form
It took a while after Baby’s arrival to even begin contemplating writing again (which is another reason I did so much reading). Then, just as I felt ready to dive into a manuscript, my father passed away, which put our whole family in a tail spin. Between grieving and taking care of Baby, it took months to get back to writing.
During this time, I also wanted more comforting reads that I had typically been interested in previously.
I will say that I just now feel like I’m getting back “to form.” My first manuscript written was not initially an mpreg story. My second and subsequent WIPs were more traditional mpreg narratives. Additional projects I’m working on are also mpreg-focused.
I had tried writing a couple of other WIPs prior to the fall, but they simply weren’t going anywhere. I struggled with them, which I should have guessed meant I wasn’t ready to write them, for one reason or another.
I’m a Mood Writer
Now, I feel like I have tons of ideas and not enough time to write them all. That’s a more familiar situation for me. I always feel like I don’t have enough time to write all the stories I want to tell.
It also doesn’t help that I’m often a big mood writer. That means I need to be beaned on the head with inspiration to dive into a manuscript and finish it. Even if I force myself to work on a story, without that inspiration, it often feels lifeless—and I’m likely to ditch the draft about halfway through and reboot it. (That’s something that happened with two of my next few books; until the fall of 2024, writing the next book in the Zodiac series felt like pulling teeth. Once inspiration hit, though, I couldn’t wait to get going.)
What that means is if I’m not feeling a manuscript, I kind of dither around in the story, unsure of where it will go. Sometimes that works out—I have a flash of insight and the story ends up on the page. Most often, it means I abandon the story for something that is inspiring me, then wrap back around to the story.
Most of the time I think that means I just need to sit with the idea; it needs to marinate. But over the last few months, I think this need was less about letting ideas marinate and more about letting me process traumatic events. And I had to do that processing before I could come back to writing more generally.
The Creative Juices Are Flowing Again
I don’t know that the processing is complete—is the processing of trauma ever truly finished? But I have moved far enough through the process to be able to come back to the writing.
And that feels really good, especially since reading and writing one of my favorite subgenres felt so foreign to me for so many months. Pregnancy and childbirth made me feel like a stranger in my mind. I hardly felt like myself.
With every day that passes, I feel more and more like myself—and that means I’m able to return to the things I love at last.
