Bear with Me: What They Don't Tell You About Pregnancy

Naomi Brun is a librarian assistant in Communications and Community
Development at the Hamilton Public Library and a book reviewer for the
Hamilton Spectator.

“‘I’ve noticed that women tell their birth stories like old men
tell their war stories,’” writes Diane Flacks in Bear with Me. Like
so much else in her book, it’s absolutely true. Bear with Me is a
no-holds-barred account of Flacks’s own pregnancy, labour, and
transition to motherhood, with war stories from other pregnancy veterans
to provide a bit of perspective.

Since this book is a first-person account of pregnancy and childbirth,
it’s important to know that Diane Flacks isn’t your typical
first-time mom. She’s a lesbian, Jewish, 30-something actress and
screenwriter living in Toronto, and everything that she writes is
filtered through that lens. In fact, Bear with Me reads like a wickedly
funny sitcom from the 1990s, featuring a pregnant Jewish lesbian and her
urbane friends.

Everything in this book is true, and nothing is even remotely clouded
by sentimentality. This is no rose-tinted take on the miraculous
development of a new life; neither is it a precautionary tome advising
the reader to start eating right and taking folic acid early. Like most
of us, Flacks didn’t expect to get pregnant right away, so she did all
the wrong things. “I was so sure that I wasn’t pregnant that I drank
red wine and smoked some pure Northern Ontario reefer. I had stopped
taking folic acid, and I’m sure I ate shellfish—with a splash of
unpasteurized cheese.” She writes of all the unhelpful things pregnant
women are bound to hear, and of the bodily changes each trimester
brings. She spares nothing in her descriptions of labour
(“menstruating chainsaws” is one of my particular favourites) or of
the first few weeks of being a new parent.

Flacks wrote this book to be helpful to expectant women, but honestly,
it’s much more fun to read after having had a baby. As honest and
accurate as Flacks is, there are just some things that won’t make
sense until they’ve been experienced, and childbirth is one of them.

Reading Bear with Me is like sitting down for coffee with your
girlfriends, swapping war stories, and comparing war wounds. It’s
awful, but it’s awe-filled, too.