How Being Pregnant Is Like My Dog Running Away

And other reflections on anxiety

May 21st, 2025

My dog is extremely attuned, intelligent and attached to me. It wasn’t hard to train her, because she’s constantly looking to me for cues about what she should be doing. So when she runs away, to chase a squirrel or a deer, I know she’ll try to find me the second her prey drive high wears off. Depending on the environment, wide open desert or dense forest, and how far she chased the animal before admitting defeat, this can take her varying amounts of time. The longest that time has stretched to (excluding the first time she ran off and legitimately got lost while still a puppy) is about 30 minutes. Most of the time, it’s more like 5-10.

I’ve learned to trust that she has an excellent sense of direction and wants to find her way back to me and will, eventually. And when she does, it’s kind of glorious. She’s speeding with purpose and excitement, shivering and wiggling when she finds me. So proud, so excited, and so relieved to be reunited, just as I am. This has happened so many times that when she runs away, I know that very soon, this is the feeling I will feel. Not loss, not terror, but rather the incomparable joy of a being who is truly capable of unconditional love reuniting with her pack after a thrilling chase through the wilderness.

Even so, when I’m on a hike, and I suddenly stop hearing the swoosh of her running through the leaves or the gentle jingle of her dog tags, a sensation sets in that’s not quite fear as much as “it now takes effort to not feel fear.” Physical and psychological muscles get activated, ready to flex. Stories form in my brain. Helpful ones and unhelpful ones. And parts of myself come online and start sorting through them for me, cataloging memories and predictions as relevant and not relevant. Whereas before her absence, I was focused only on how pretty the sun looked through the leaves or the deep conversation I was having with my hiking partner, now a catalogue of options for how the day could go, how my life could go, start flipping in front of my consciousness.

Again, I need to stress that I do not “freak out” in these situations. From the outside, I look pretty calm, but I’m not as chatty with my co-hiker anymore. I’m listening for Ripley, my ears precisely tuned to understand her specific cadence through the brush as distinct from a rabbit’s or the wind. I’m aware. I’m listening. I’m on high alert. And a part of me will not be able to listen for or think about anything else until Ripley appears again.

This is how it feels to be pregnant. For me. I feel taunted by my body’s inability to check on the beings that live in my body. How is it possible that I don’t know if they’re ok? That I have no way of knowing if they’re ok? I can tell how my elbow is doing. My stomach. But I can’t sense these little ones yet. They are already distinct beings, and though they are as intimately close to me as it is possible to be they are unknowable, unobservable. In this way, I feel more disconnected from them than from my dog, who I can essentially have a conversation with through our eyebrows. (Granted, we have a special relationship.) Still, this is something either no one told me about or I didn’t understand. The eeriness of pregnancy. Of hosting another. In my case, two other beings. They’re mine. They’re of me. We are deeply connected, and yet, I don’t know how they’re doing. I can’t hear them. I can’t feel them yet. Maybe this will change when I can start feel them moving around?

I did not expect to enjoy getting sonograms as much as I do. But I’ve come to realize that seeing the babies, hearing their heartbeats, watching them flex and kick and move around, it gives me the same feeling as when I hear Ripley’s little dog tags in the distance, and I know she’s ok, coming back to me. It’s in these moments that I realize that a part of me has been on high alert until the sonogram, all of my subconscious parts working tirelessly to fend off the unhelpful worries and the dread.

You hear things before you get pregnant about “anxiety.” To me, I understood pregnancy anxiety to mean “you’re going to worry about miscarriages, you’re going to be freaking out about every little symptom.” I didn’t picture myself as the type to fall into that trap. But I’ve reached a point where I’m ready to admit that I’m anxious. A lot of the time. For me, the anxiety feels more like a frustrated impatience. I’m aware that the little ones are most likely fine. But I can’t see them. And this irritates me. I just know that if I could see them, I’d know what they needed. I can’t observe them, so I have to read books, talk to people, and do this whole “listen to my body” thing that everyone’s always on about. Easy to say when your body isn’t sending entirely contradictory messages all the time. In the end, I’ve had to make peace with the knowledge that resting, drinking fluids and eating are essentially never a bad thing to do during pregnancy. So, when in doubt, I do one of those things, and wish the little ones the best.

Is this feeling, the feeling of not freaking out, but fending-off-freaking-out, is this feeling going to stay with me for the rest of my life? Is this what being a parent feels like? My experience with Ripley tells me no, not quite. There are moments where I’m on high alert, and there are (more) moments where I’m at ease. Where, in fact, my dog’s relaxed and content and clearly well-cared for state of being proves to me that I feel the same. She’s like an extra nervous system that lives outside of my body that I can observe and co-regulate with.

People get sort of weird about comparing having dogs to having kids sometimes. But, I do think having a dog is a kind of beginner’s class in parenthood. Obviously, it doesn’t teach you everything you need to know. It’s more like those toddler soccer classes where they just kind of waddle around in uniforms on a field and giggle while they trip over balls. It’s not about learning how to do the thing, it’s building a familiarity with the kind of terrain you’ll be navigating. My attachment system, my attunement, my ability to nurture, to discern discomfort, to understand my own experience as it relates to a being I’m responsible for… these have all been at least explored in my relationship with Ripley, with far lower stakes, of course. In any case, it’s my best point of reference for this experience so far.

Will this “anxiety” calm down when I start feeling them kick? Will we start building a language, or will I start discerning a code, that can tell me that they’re here, they’re ok, that we can relax and think about other things now? I’ll report back in a few weeks.

July 15th, 2025

At 22 weeks, they started kicking. Feelings had been subtle before that. A flutter, a grumble, a pinch, a pull… each time triggering a “was that something?” like wishful suspicions in the hour after you’ve taken old mushrooms that might or might not work. When the decisive kick came, there was no mistaking it. Clear, resounding, strong, not me, it moved my belly up. I felt it from the inside. Then I put my hand over the skin and felt it from the outside as well. My jaw dropped. It’s aliiiiiiiiive! I called my boyfriend, who I had been subjecting to daily interrogations while on our trip to California, placing his hand on a patch of belly and demanding, “Do you feel something?” The answer always the same, “Maybe?” I screamed the news at him. They were moving! I was DEFINITELY feeling them kick. I couldn’t wait to show him and everyone I knew.

Since that moment, they haven’t stopped kicking. With each passing day, their movements get stronger, more distinct. I’m starting to be able to discern which one is which, the difference between their types of movement: martial arts, hiccups, tumbling, and miscellaneous. Weirdly, one really likes to move to my right side, which makes it poke out noticeably, breaking the smooth egg shape of my sloping belly. I don’t know if this means that Baby A (as it’s known in twin-land) has colonized the middle as their own, or if something about where the amniotic sacs are just has one further over to my right, but it’s an odd feeling.

Anyway, clearly, the little ones are doing great. How neat!?

Last week, my psychiatrist and I were talking about anxiety, as we’re wont to do. When I explained that I had felt nervous because my long trip in California meant that I had to go longer than was recommended without a sonogram, and that I hadn’t felt the babies kicking yet, she nodded and asked, “So what happened when you had your scan and everything was normal, and you started to feel them moving?” I responded, “I felt much better! I’m not really worrying about them right now.” She said, “So it sounds like you’re worrying about things that make sense to worry about, and you’re able to relax when those worries have been addressed?” which made me sound so impressively sane that I felt an award of some kind was in order.

So I decided to celebrate by allowing myself to start worrying about the birth!

So what is this worry like? Not like my dog running away. No. This is something that will happen. This is coming. This isn’t anxiety about if. This is fear about when. The birth scares me, straight up.

Last summer I had a laparoscopy to determine if I had endometriosis. (I did not.) For some reason, I expected this surgery to be relatively chill, and was shocked at how much pain I was in when I woke up. I should’ve expected it. They had, after all, cut open my abdomen. I was still very much on the anesthesia when my friend came and sat beside me and I remember slurring my words while I declared “If having a babyyyy feels like thisssss, I dunnoif Iwanna doit” to which she snorted and lovingly patted my hand, knowing full well that this was nothing comparable to the pain associated with childbirth.

Within a couple of hours I was less dramatic, but the recovery was more intense than I expected. Something no one told me about is the air bubbles that build up in your body after surgery. For me it was in my shoulders. I had unbelievable pain in my shoulders and upper back, which just felt unfair and vindictive given that the surgery was nowhere near that part of my body.

Though the scar took a long time to heal and looked worse than I expected, overall the recovery was not so bad and I could do all my normal activities after a week or so. But it jostled me. The pain and the uncomfortable recovery surprised and humbled me and made me think about birth with a different lens.

My single biggest fear about birth is having a long, complicated recovery afterwards. Even though I’ve lined up a ton of support, the thought of being physically unable to pick up my babies or do basic things around the house is really upsetting. Admitting physical limitations and asking for help has already been such a huge struggle for me during pregnancy, and I know that I’ll have to continue to do so even with the best outcomes of new parenthood, but right now, more than anything, I long for an easy body, and a fear lives within me that I had one once and now it might never come back.

This fear is my new guilty pleasure. The latest fixation that I’ve decided to spend my anxiety allowance on. How am I dealing with it? Hopefully in mostly productive ways, but it’s hard when deciding on a birth plan is so culturally loaded. For instance, a lot of people have assumed that I want a “natural” or home birth, and offered resources to me for midwives and organizations who specialize in providing them for twin pregnancies. Many people have assumed that I want the fewest number of medical interventions possible. Most people assume I definitely don’t want a c-section.

Really, I don’t actually want to do any of these things. They all sound awful to me. What I want is to skip the birth altogether. Obviously I can’t do that. But my point is that the thing that motivated this whole adventure has nothing to do with the birth itself. I want to be a parent. And I want my babies to be healthy. And I want my body to recover smoothly. The path that has the highest likelihood of getting me to that outcome works for me, and the path that has the lowest likelihood is what I want to avoid at all costs.

Though I had my era of romanticizing childbirth as a possible source of magical, shamanistic meaning, I’ve moved away from the desire to optimize for that experience of birth. I’ve come around to preferring other routes to profundity and magic that involve less physical pain and existential risk, like making art, participating in activist causes, taking psychedelics, going into nature, or, you know, raising children. I don’t feel I have anything to prove to myself or the world about how strong I am. And I certainly don’t think that if I did want to prove my strength, I’d do it by showing how much pain I’m capable of enduring. I know how much pain I can take. It’s a lot.

So I searched for a doula without an agenda. Someone who knew a lot about birth, had seen a lot of different situations, including twins and c-sections, and could answer my questions and help me make decisions. At the same time, I wanted someone who wouldn’t judge me if I wanted a c-section or question me if I wanted an epidural. I believe I’ve found someone and I hope to transmute this pet anxiety monster into tangible knowledge and clear decisions that will help me mentally and physically prepare for whatever kind of birth I have.

But in the meantime, the truth of the situation is that there is no flow chart that anyone can give me that lays out all the possible scenarios with accuracy and allows me to successfully pick the choice that will lead to the possible world in which I’m the happiest. We all know, at some level, that this is actually always true of literally everything. Does it make the quest for some semblance of control or agency pointless? No. But it does make it neverending.

In debaucherous camaraderie,
🪶Rachel Lark

What you can expect from The Larkstack

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3. I’ll also share announcements about life as an artist; things like show announcements, music releases and new merch.

Announcements

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