By Charlotte Massaquoi

I spent much of my life believing things about pregnancy that were never really true.

I believed it would cost me myself. My identity, my body, my sense of who I was. I had been a dancer most of my life — someone whose relationship to her body was functional, demanding, and deeply tied to how it looked and what it could do. I lifted weights, I moved constantly, I occupied my physical form in a way that felt intentional. And underneath all of that was a quiet fear: what happens to my sense of self, what happens to my body, when pregnancy changes everything?

I didn't even have the language for it at the time. I just knew that when I became pregnant, a speechless fear overtook me. I've described it since as a cartoon blackout — that image of a black tunnel collapsing into a tiny white light at the end. Oh. Here we go. The fear wasn’t crippling because I was married and this was the plan but it was there nonetheless. I knew from this point on it was unlike any other.

What I came to discover is: the fear wasn't really mine. It was borrowed. It was cultural. Dare I even say, spiritual. It was the accumulation of a thousand little messages I had absorbed without questioning them — about what pregnancy does to a woman's body, about what it takes away from her, about how you never quite get yourself back. A ball and chain. I had been told, in ways both loud and subtle, that my body was something to revel in before children and protect from children.

I was wrong. And I think a lot of women are believing the same lie right now.

The Body I Was So Afraid to Lose

Here is what's almost funny in retrospect: the thing I was most afraid of — is precisely what pregnancy gave me more of.

As a dancer, I had learned to relate to my body through the lens of sensation, rhythm, aesthetic, and performance. The senses and emotions led me, rhythm and music led me, image and standards led me, and achievement through performance led me. Ultimately, my sense of self led me. There were many beautiful aspects in that way of relating with myself and my body. But, there were also so many limitations and misperceptions, not unlike the mirror that was always there.

Pregnancy dismantled that entirely, and it did it in the most disorienting and ultimately freeing way. My body stopped belonging to the self and all its hedonic indulgences. It started belonging to something else, someone else — to the mantle of a new purpose, to this baby growing inside me.

I had to learn to release my ego. My image. The version of myself I had spent years curating. And in that release, something unexpected happened: I became more connected, not less. More present in my physical body. More in awe of what my body was quietly, steadily unveiling. I even joked, yeah me and God are working on this collaboration.

In college, I’d participate in live improv dance shows. The entire show, including the live music, was all made up in real time before an audience. I remember in rehearsal for these shows, my dance professor would encourage me to start the performance before I felt ready; if I delayed for too long I would get overstimulated and crippled by indecision.

Here’s the thing, pregnancy is the same. You just have to go for it before you may feel completely ready, before you’re frozen by fear and overwhelmed by the unknown. Pregnancy doesn’t wait for you to be ready, it simply begins, and your body answers. This time my baby was the music that beckoned me to enter the stage, except unlike the music, he needed this dance in order to live. And that is a dance with infinitely more weight than ever before. How would I choose to approach this improv, with trepidation or with trust? I knew it had to be the latter.

What the Fear Was Actually About

Motherhood is a great antidote for the lies of feminism. I know that now. But for years, I was living inside those lies without knowing it.

Women like me, women conditioned by the culture we grew up in — carry an element of unnatural fear into pregnancy.

We were raised, whether we realized it or not, to see ourselves through a lens that was never designed for us. We were told to be ambitious in ways that looked masculine. To prioritize careers over children. To treat our bodies as instruments of productivity or aesthetics rather than of life. We were handed a version of freedom that, if we're honest, left a lot of us feeling quietly angry and out of touch with something we couldn't name.

I think what we couldn't name was our own femininity. Our own design.

Because here is what I now know, on the other side of pregnancy and early motherhood: the things I was taught to fear about my body were actually descriptions of its power. The changes, the transformation, the way pregnancy reshapes you from the inside out — none of that is loss. It is becoming. It is the body doing exactly what it was designed to do, with a specificity and intelligence that is, frankly, staggering when you stop fighting it long enough to notice.

Your body grows a human. It adapts, it sustains, it provides, it delivers. And then — impossibly — it heals. I had 60 hours of labor with my son. Two and a half days. I did not sleep for two nights. And I would do it again, because what waited on the other side, who waited on the other side, of all of that was a moment I will spend the rest of my life trying to describe to people who haven't felt it yet.

The Moment Everything Changed

When they placed my baby in my arms — all the lights and noise and the controlled chaos of delivery — something happened that I did not expect.

Peace.

Not the absence of chaos. Not quiet. But peace underneath everything — like a silence running beneath the sound. I could hear it. And my baby, this brand new person who had just arrived into the most overwhelming sensory experience imaginable, needed exactly one thing to find that same peace.

My voice.

My voice alone calmed him. And in that moment, I understood something about myself that I had spent years searching for through dance, through discipline, through every form of self-improvement I had ever attempted. I had walked through the doorway of my purpose. The unconditional, take-your-breath-away love of becoming a mother — was something I had deeply longed for, maybe my whole life, without ever knowing it.

The lies I had believed said that motherhood would diminish me. The truth is that it completed something I didn't know was incomplete.

What I Would Say to the Woman Who Is Afraid

If you are the woman I used to be — I want to tell you something directly:

That fear is not your own. It was handed to you by a culture whose lies attack precisely where we derive most of our meaning.

Pregnancy is hard. I won't pretend otherwise, and I don't think pretending serves you. It is physically demanding and sometimes uncomfortable and occasionally humbling in ways you will not fully appreciate until you're on the other side. But hard and beautiful are not opposites. They coexist constantly in pregnancy, and the blessing — the intimacy, the transformation, the purpose, the love — runs deeper than the difficulty.

You are not going to lose yourself. You are going to shed a version of yourself that was never the whole story. You are going to form a chrysalis. And what emerges is not a diminished woman — it is an expanded woman, it is the woman you were always meant to be.

Charlotte Massaquoi is a former dancer and mom to two. She was interviewed as part of the ReThink Pregnancy campaign, a joint initiative between EveryLife and AAPLOG (American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists) dedicated to giving women the full, scientifically accurate, and beautifully true picture of what pregnancy is and does. Learn more at rethinkpregnancy.com.