Growing a mother, in 9 hard months

“Earth MOTHER” is not a term that pops to mind to describe Canadian newspaper columnist and chronicler of the hip scene Rebecca Eckler. Urban, obsessively self-centered, egoistic, painfully funny -- these adjectives work.

Eckler, 30, had made a name for herself writing about all the ways singles (mostly) in their 20s and 30s captured the zeitgeist of the culture by buying the right brands, sporting the right accessories, frequenting the right bars and living the right life. That life, she points out in “Knocked Up,” the memoir of her unplanned pregnancy, did not include motherhood. At least not yet.

But when she and her fiance throw themselves a lavish engagement party, they proceed to get exceptionally drunk and end the night with unprotected sex. As she’d learned in her Grade 6 sex education class -- “I really should have paid attention during ... those classes” -- one time is all it takes. “Is it possible for a sperm to be too drunk to know what it’s doing?” she wonders. “I mean, the fiance and I were certainly too drunk to know what we were doing.”

Four home pregnancy tests and a doctor’s blood analysis confirm her worst fear. Complicating matters is the fact that her fiance lives in another city, two time zones away, and the couple have no immediate plans for a wedding. “Life apparently does not happen when you’re busy making other plans,” she concludes in these daily vignettes that grew out of a series of newspaper columns. “Life is what happens when there is an open bar.”

Ambivalence is too soft a word to describe her annoyance at the thought of motherhood. “Being pregnant is definitely going to ruin my life, a life which was pretty simple but thoroughly enjoyable. My life is about partying with friends ... [p]hone [c]alls the morning after, going to spin classes so my [behind] can fit into low-rise jeans, and writing columns for a newspaper,” she writes. “The worst thing about being pregnant right now would be that I was so very close to reaching my goal of having Janet Jackson abs.”

What follows is a nine-month transition as Eckler changes from the hip, sexy columnist into a funny but self-obsessed worrywart, freaking out that the young intern in her office is going to get her job, concerned that her rear end is growing to unreasonable proportions, that her fiance will no longer love her now that her weight has passed the 100-pound mark, all the while eating McDonald’s Big Macs and sneaking cigarettes.

Throughout the nine-month journey, readers are treated to Eckler’s biting wit and sarcastic take on pregnancy and impending motherhood. There are times she comes off as a spoiled, whiney brat in need of a serious talking-to, but that only makes the story more enjoyable when the human, frail and fallible side shows through. Eckler, we learn, gleans most of her information about pregnancy and childbirth from reading about celebrity mothers in a weekly entertainment magazine. (“I am never studying another pregnancy book again until I absolutely have no choice,” she vows after perusing one such title. “It will be just like high school. When I start having contractions, I’ll cram.”)

She’s terrified of going through the birth process and manages to track down an obstetrician who will perform a C-section at her request. (Afterward, she’s convinced that elective C-sections are the wave of the future when Vogue publishes an article about them. “Once it’s in Vogue, it’s like the law.”) One of her biggest concerns is to make sure she schedules a pedicure and bikini wax before the big day.

The tone is often flippant, and Eckler’s early response to pregnancy goes beyond cheerless. Still, it’s fun to watch her change from the woman who dreaded seeing mothers with infants board an airplane to being that mother herself, to witness her transition from a person who loathed the thought of a baby shower to someone who “oohs” and “ahhs” over every tiny piece of clothing.

She never embraces the motherhood-is-everything philosophy -- she hires a nanny immediately, plans to not breastfeed to the aghast response of friends -- but she does learn how to change a diaper.

Eventually, she turns into one of those people she hated, the type who gives unsolicited advice to new parents and pregnant women, telling them that motherhood will be the most rewarding experience of their lives.

“Oh God,” she laments, upon realizing this change. “I’ve gone over to the dark side.”

Bernadette Murphy is a regular contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a work of narrative nonfiction.