One Friday in October, I started falling in love with everyone, and I stayed in love for two weeks, with everyone. This was awkward. It was a moony, teenage sort of love. I waited for the phone to ring. I was shy, almost anguished. I missed appointments, even with the people I loved, which was everyone, and so stayed at home and saw no one, my mind full of impossible thoughts.

I did manage to go to a school reunion (where I loved them all) and to the opening night of a play (where I made some wonderful new friends), but mostly I mooched, and wrote letters to celebrate the fact that I had just finished a book and that life was, perhaps unbearably, good.

Towards the end of this peculiar fortnight, I had a dream full of the usual suspects, people from my past who spoke to me in an unsettling, unresolved way. I have this dream, with variations, all the time, but this night it was interrupted by a woman I barely knew 20 years ago, who floated in through a window, dressed in pink. She smiled an angelic smile, as if to say, “None of this matters, any more”, and then she patted her stomach, very gently. I started awake with the thought that I was pregnant; then I turned over to go back to sleep, saying to myself that the moment had come: it was time to stop the shilly shally, the hit and miss, we had to get this conception thing going, properly, finally, and have the baby that was waiting for us, after all these years.

Soon after, I went to Berlin for a reading, half-dreading who I might be obliged to fall in love with there - but some time in the middle of the weekend, I hit a wall. I couldn’t say why this was. I didn’t tell my hosts that I knew German and disliked the half-understood conversations they held in front of me, before turning to talk English with a smile. I walked the streets, planning a story about a woman who falls in love all the time, and another story that was full of mistranslation and sly insinuation, where a woman meets a foreign couple and cannot quite tell what is going on.

My hostess said that she loved a dream passage in one of my books, where the ceiling is full of dangling penises. I have never written such a passage, nor anything like it, but she insisted; she was even quite insulted, as though I were accusing her of having my own pornographic thoughts. What could I say? I said that I would check. But I noticed, in myself, a terrible physical weight, as if I could not carry my life around any more, I could not even lift it off the chair. I thought that perhaps I should stop writing books: something, at any rate, had to change. I walked from Schönhäuserallee to Unter den Linden, looking at the afternoon moon over Berlin, thinking that soon, when it was full, my period would come and then everything would right itself again.

On the way back to Dublin, I stopped over in London and got very drunk. The hangover seemed to last a week. I felt terrible. I dosed myself with miso soup and seaweed. I was insane for miso soup and seaweed. I still thought my life must change. I went on the internet and typed in “ovulation” on the search engine, then turned to my husband, Martin, saying, “I think this beer is off. Is there something wrong with this beer?”

We bought the pregnancy test from a girl with romantic thoughts behind the cash register in Boots. Martin says I was delighted when it proved positive, but I was not delighted - I was shocked and delighted maybe, but I was mostly deeply shocked.

If Kafka had been a woman, then Gregor Samsa would not have turned into an insect, he would not have had to. Gregor would be Gretel, and she would wake up one morning pregnant. She would try to roll over and discover she was stuck on her back. She would wave her little hands uselessly in the air.

It seems to me that I spent the next six weeks on the sofa listening to repeats of The Archers, but my computer files record the fact that I worked, and that I also surfed the net. I was looking for information on what happens when you get really drunk in the early stages of pregnancy, but the sites were all based in America, a country where they want to lock expectant women up for drinking Diet Coke. In the chat rooms and on the noticeboards, all the pregnant women talked about their pets: the cat who just knew, the dog who got upset. There was also a lot of stuff about miscarriages.

Martin took me up the mountains to keep me fit and I nearly puked into the bog. I got stuck on one tussock and could not jump to the next. The life inside me was too delicate, and impossible and small. No jumping, no running, no sex, no driving, no drink, no laughs, no household cleaning, no possibility, however vague or unwanted, of amorous adventures, no trips to India, no cheerful leaps from one tussock to the next in the goddamn bog. I made the jump anyway, and went over on my ankle. Darkness started to fall.

The next weekend he brought me to Prague, as a surprise. There are two things in my life that I have never turned down: one is a drink and the other is an airplane ticket. Already friends were starting to look askance when I stuck to water, and now I sat in the departure lounge and did not want to board the plane. This intense reluctance, this exhaustion, was pregnancy. It was nine in the morning. People were running to the gates, buying newspapers, checking their boarding passes and drinking prophylactic shots of whisky. I looked at the world around me and listened to my own blood. There was a deep note humming through me, so low that no one else could hear. It was in every part of me, swelling in my face and hands, and it felt like joy.

The weeks when you are generally, as opposed to locally, pregnant, are a mess. I put on weight in odd places. I went to the kitchen in the middle of the night to see what nameless, but really specific, thing I was starving for. I sat down on the floor in front of the open fridge and cried. The aisles of the supermarket were filled with other possibly pregnant women - paralysed in front of the breakfast cereals, stroking packets of organic lentils, picking up, and setting down again, a six-pack of Petit Filous. Starvation is no joke, especially when you have been eating all day. I had, over the years, managed to have every neurosis except the one about food, and now my body was having it for me.

At 10 weeks, I went to the obstetrician, as if she could somehow fix what was wrong with me. We talked about post-natal depression (could I be having it already?). We talked about amniocentesis, but not much. She did not seem to realise that the child I had inside me would have to be deformed. She led me up a terrazzo staircase that smelled of school, and brought me into a dark room. “Right,” she said, flicking on the light, “let’s have a look.” I was expecting stirrups, but instead I got an ultrasound. The baby was like a little beansprout. It flicked and jumped, as though annoyed to be disturbed. She lingered with her sonic pen, as though this sight amazed her every time. It was all too much to bear. I said, “It looks a bit disgusting”, and she said, “Don’t be silly”, as though she knew I was just shamming.

All of a sudden, I was going to have a baby. The fact of my pregnancy was as real and constant to me as a concrete block in the middle of the room, but I still did not know what it meant. A baby. A baby! I had to realise this many times: first with a premonition, then with a shock. I had to realise it slowly, and I had to realise the joy. After the ultrasound, it came to me all in a clatter and I walked home, roaring it out in my head. That night, we went out to tell my parents. My mother said very little but, every time I looked at her, she looked five years younger, and then five years younger again. She was fundamentally, metabolically pleased. She was pleased all the way through, as I was pregnant all the way through.

I spent the next six months remembering and forgetting again, catching up with what my body already knew. The world senses this gap. It seemed like everyone was trying to persuade me into this baby, as though they had made a great investment in me and didn’t trust me to take care of it. Out of badness, I did my best to drink (and failed) and took an occasional guilt-frenzied cigarette. This made one woman, a practical stranger, burst into tears. I wondered what her mother was like.

A pregnant woman is public property. I began to feel like a bus with “Mammy” written on the front - and the whole world was clambering on. Four women in a restaurant cheered when I ordered dessert. A friend went into a prolonged rage with me, for no reason I could fathom. Everyone’s unconscious was very close to their mouth. Whatever my pregnant body triggered was not social, or political, it was animal and ancient and quite helpless. It was also most unfair. Another friend showed me a pair of baby’s shoes and said, “Look, look!” He said that, in prison, they show little shoes to child molesters to make them realise how small and vulnerable their victims are. He did not seem to notice that he had put pregnant women and child molesters in the same category, as if we both needed to be told what we were.

Perhaps he was right. A pregnant woman does not know what she is. She has been overtaken. She feels sick, but she is not sick; she lives underwater, where there are no words. The world goes funny on her; it is accusing when she is delighted and applauds when she feels like shit.

People without children went, without exception, a little mad (I wasn’t entirely sane, myself). People who had children succumbed to a cherishing nostalgia. I began to enter into the romance of their lives and see them as they must have been, newly married perhaps, and in love; dreaming of the future that they were living now. Pregnancy is a non-place, a suspension, a holiday from our fallible and compromised selves. There is no other time in a woman’s life when she is so supported and praised and helped and loved. Though perhaps it is not “she” who gets all the attention, but “they”; this peculiar, mutant, double self - motherandchild.

I looked in the mirror. I had a body out of Rouault, big thick slabs of flesh, painted on stained glass. I was an amazement to myself, a work of engineering, my front cantilevered out from the solid buttress of my backside. Every night now, there was a ritual of wonder as we measured the bump. From week to week, I felt my body shift into different cycles, like some slow-motion, flesh-based washing machine. “Oh. Something else is happening now.” In the middle of January, I surfaced, quite suddenly. I realised that the strenuous work was done, the baby was somehow “made”, all it had to do now was grow.

I have no idea why the first stages of pregnancy, when the child is so tiny, should be the most exhausting. I suppose you are growing your own cells before you start on theirs. Your blood volume goes up by 30%, so your bone marrow is working, your very bone marrow is tired. It is as if you planted a seed and then had to build a field to grow it in. When that was over, everything, for me, was pure delight. If someone sold the hormones you get in the second trimester of pregnancy, I would become a junky. I cycled everywhere, walked at a clip, fell asleep between one heartbeat and the next. I started dreaming again, vivid, intense, learning dreams. I was breastfeeding a blue-eyed girl and it was easy. I was in labour and it was easy - the child that slithered out was small and as hot as a childhood dream of wetting the bed; she was the precise temperature of flesh. Some of the dreams were funny, many were completely filthy. I had 30% more blood in my body and, as far as I could tell, it was all going to the one place. Another thing the books don’t tell you.

The child was still hiding. The days ticked inexorably past. I did not feel like an animal, I felt like a clock, one made of blood and bone, that you could neither hurry nor delay. At four-and-a-half months, right on cue, it started to chime. Butterflies. A kick.

The child leapt in my womb. Actually, the child leaps in the womb all day long, but it takes time for the womb to realise it. You wait for the first kick but, like the first smile, the early versions are all “just wind”. The first definite kick (which coincided with the discovery of the first, definite pile, a shock severe enough to send a surge of adrenalin through any child) was wonderful. My body had been blind, and I barely comprehending; I had begun to long for a sign, a little something in return. The first kick is the child talking back to you, a kind of softening up. I began to have ideas about this baby, even conversations with it, some of which, to my great embarrassment, took place out loud.

“Hello sweetheart.”

***

Sugar made the child jump, as well as hunger. Music made it stop, a listening stillness. I began to time my digestion: 10 minutes after chocolate, a kick; 15 minutes after pasta; a half-hour after meat. I was bounced awake at five every morning and got up for a bowl of cereal - already feeding this little tyrant, getting in training for the real event. Early afternoon was a can-can, also nine o’clock at night. I went to New York and the child stayed on Irish time, which was very odd. In the middle of the day, I would go back to my hotel room for a rest and a chat. My belly made peculiar company. We watched My Dinner With André together, and ate great handfuls of nuts.

What did I know? I knew this child liked music, but maybe all children do. I thought it was an independent type, wriggling already, as though to get away. I began to identify whatever part of its body was squirming under my hand. One day, a shoulder bone scything up from the depths; another day, a little jutting heel. My indifference to the world grew vast. I liked things from a distance. I was in the middle of the sweetest, quietest romance.

In our first antenatal class, the midwife said, “Is there a pelvis over there on the floor behind you, could you pass it here?” And when some hapless male picked up the bit of dead person they used for demonstration purposes, she said, “Don’t be afraid of it. It’s not a chalice.” I thought this was very Irish. Secretly, I thought that perhaps my pelvis was a chalice. I also thought that it might be beginning to crack. She passed around a vial of amniotic fluid (of unspecified age, it would have been nice to know if it was fresh) and on the other side of the room a woman bent forward on to her belly, in an awkward, pregnant attempt at a faint. The midwife turned to a diagram - we had to have the window opened for air. She told us about perineal massage, I had never heard of anything so peculiar and unlikely in my life. I was surrounded by strangers, half of them men and all of them catatonic with shock. It might have been the way she lay down on a mat with her legs up in the air (she was in her 50s), or it might have just been the fact that all of us realised that there was a fundamental problem, here, of design. The hole just wasn’t big enough. And apparently there was no other way out. I felt like I had been watching a distant train for months and only now, when it was approaching, did I realise I was tied to the tracks.

My father says, quite wisely, that we should have been marsupials; pregnant up to six months, with the last three in a pouch. The disproportion was terrible. This could not be what nature intended, humans must be overbred. I couldn’t walk for more than 20 minutes. Everything hurt. Somehow, I blamed the bump and not the child for the obstruction in my gut and the vile acid that was pushed up into my throat. We weren’t to take antacids, because they would make us anaemic, the midwife said. I said, “What’s so bad about anaemia?” thinking that it couldn’t be worse than this. I sat and surfed the net like some terrible turnip, gagging and leaning back in my chair. I became clumsy, and not just because of the weight out front - dishes dropped for no reason out of my hands. My shoes didn’t fit. At 35 weeks, just like all the other women on the About.com pregnancy noticeboard, I started fighting with Martin: even this was predetermined, as the hormonal conveyor belt ground on. Oh, the stupidity of it, the blankness, the senseless days and the terrible, interrupted nights. Somewhere in there, I forgot entirely that I was having a child. Nothing wonderful could come of this. I was bored to madness, and there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do about it, because I had the concentration span of a gnat. A very fat gnat.

The streets that had been full of babies in their buggies now became full of the old and the infirm, people who couldn’t manage the step on to the bus, or who failed to reach the queue before the till closed. Was it possible that pregnancy was turning me into a nicer person? I thought of the women I knew when I was young who were pregnant all the time. I did sums: the mother of a schoolfriend who had 22 pregnancies, 11 of which came to term. She would look up from her plate, surrounded by bottles of pills, and say “Oh... Hello...” as though trying to figure out if you had come out of her or of someone else. Her husband was mad about her, you could still see it, and her children, with the exception of the eldest boys, were strangers.

Even my own much discussed, often caressed, high-focus bump was filled with someone I did not know. And perhaps never would. Pregnancy is as old- fashioned as religion, and it never ends. Every moment of my pregnancy lasted for ever. I was pregnant in the autumn, and I was pregnant in the spring. I was pregnant as summer came. I lived like a plant on the windowsill, taking its time, starting to bud. Nothing could hurry this. There was no technology for it: I was the technology - increasingly stupid, increasingly kind, a mystery to myself, to Martin, and to everyone who passed me by

© Anne Enright. Next week: The birth.