You Might Feel a Little Pressure
Finding Wonder After Miscarriage
The moving memoir You Might Feel a Little Pressure honors the often minimized pain that can accompany miscarriages.
Mary Adkins’s affecting memoir You Might Feel a Little Pressure is about enduring three miscarriages in nine months.
In 2021 at a family reunion, Adkins bought a home pregnancy test and watched as the pink line indicated a positive result. Because her first pregnancy had led to the birth of a healthy and spirited son, Adkins was unprepared for what followed: Despite her obstetrician’s confirmation of conception and the detection of a fetal heartbeat, the fetus died within the first trimester. Two other miscarriages followed.
With candor, humor, and at times obsessed yearning, Adkins details her three disrupted pregnancies, from the initial hormonal changes to her uneasy intuitive feelings that something might be wrong. Trying to overcome the shock of loss, she became determined to conceive again. But prior to that point, each fetus had to be expelled—through medication, surgery, or waiting for spontaneous miscarriage to occur.
The book also delves into Adkins’s earlier life, exploring her issues with bulimia, perfectionism, and body image. She relates youthful insecurities and how purging food allowed her to stay thin and maintain conventional attractiveness. A stellar law student, her unsatisfying legal employment led to shifting priorities and a successful career as a novelist. And after a troubled romantic relationship, she found a loving marital partner. But when confronted by the inability to “fix” her lost pregnancies or fill the “holes” of perceived fertility failures, Adkins felt frustrated and powerless.
The book excels in its focus on the often minimized pain of miscarriage. More than just the loss of an early-stage fetus, the event can bring a sense of grief, confusion, and self-betrayal. Adkins notes her considerable emotional aftereffects, along with the forty days of “biblical, brutal, and infuriating” vaginal bleeding caused by the pills prescribed to terminate her first unsuccessful pregnancy. Yet the alternative of waiting for a natural miscarriage evoked traumatic memories of bulimia; she confesses that “walking around with a dead baby … felt as impossible as choosing not to purge after eating.” After undergoing a surgical procedure to remove and analyze her third deceased fetus, Atkins learns that the child had Down syndrome. Later, with lovely and poignant perception, she envisions the ghost of her little girl with Down syndrome, “smiling hugely” and refusing erasure by beckoning with spirited kinship.
In depicting her strong-willed tendencies, Adkins includes wry insights, such as that her astrological sign is the indomitable Taurus. Her husband, Lucas, is also depicted with nuance, as his continued support was tested and he posed the forthright question “When does life get to be easy?” After her dispirited IVF efforts, Adkins describes the leveling yet reflective effect that the miscarriages had on her psyche, and how she no longer wanted to pursue “Old Mary’s” goal-driven needs. But while this perspective brings renewal, it also seems personally dismissive; the rejecting of previous achievements, attitudes, and experiences hints at a subtle and continued fault-finding that challenges integrated healing.
Written with heartfelt and unflinching eloquence, the memoir You Might Feel a Little Pressure is about emerging from miscarriages, infertility, and self-doubt.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
