Tadpoles Frog spawn mass together in a jellied gloop, each globe squidgy and hard like an eyeball. The black round dot in the middle is the size of a peppercorn. It doesn''t seem possible that it will change but one morning, well, there it is and the peppercorn is no longer a peppercorn but an elongated comma. The next day a few start to wriggle--hectic--like small charcoal ribbons. Feathery gills emerge overnight from their necks, like ruffs. They wiggle out of their jellied beds, free. Now, they alternately pause and float at the top of the water, or silk-twitch around, looking for food. A few days later, their tails suddenly thicken and lengthen, becoming one long black arrow encased in 30-denier tights.

For much of this time, they fall throuuuugh the water, and let their bodies carry them down, down, down. Some are bigger than others. Some are quicker than others. Some move less. Over the next few days, their heads grow until they look like cartoon sperm, propelled through the water. Small nubs appear, the beginnings of legs. Their bodies turn from opaque to translucent, speckled with gold. Next, feet appear on each side, webbed and splayed.

At the end are threadlike tree-branch toes. They suck the sides of the tank where we are raising them with their black ring mouth. Their hearts? Red. A waste tube trails beneath. Flick! Their tails can ripple the surface of the water. They dive up and down, then become still and rest. Now, the bodies are dark green-black with bronze lacquer spots. Beady, crocodilian eyes emerge on top of their heads.

Then, their arms emerge, with four-fingered hands. The head becomes more pointed and the skin becomes less translucent. Then, it is a froglet with a tadpole tail! It is! Then--and you can barely believe it--it is a frog. It is! A week later, one is lying at the bottom of the pond, pale and lifeless. Ten or so tiny, bright-pink bloodworms are going at it furiously, taking its body into their bodies, bit by bit. 1. All-day sickness The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id What I expected in pregnancy Sickness in the morning Glowing skin Shiny hair Bigger boobs Weird cravings What I did not expect in pregnancy Restless leg syndrome Acne Hair loss Kiss curls Eczema Sciatica Constant and severe nausea To feel stoned Mysteriously high white blood cell count Mysterious infections Numb hands Pins and needles Hotter (in body temperature) Incredible sense of smell Color changes (darkened nipples; vulva; hair color) Linea nigra A digestive roller coaster Heightened sense of threat Shame Flatter nose Increased vascularity leading to increased intensity of orgasm Dry eyes Pinguecula Wider jaw Needing to wee six times a night A mouth full of blood after toothbrushing Ecstasy Insomnia A preoccupying obsessive urge for the baby to live Brain fog Di s.

s ol u t. i. o. n. of the self And then To become Something Else - It happened around the time I grew a heart. I could smell everything. The armpits and groins of those who passed by on a wide road. Specks of food on a train seat.

A cigarette around the corner. The town--population: thousands--and what kind of soap people used that morning. Coconut or tea tree oil or Pears or if they missed a shower, all chundering around in a horrible soup. At night I could smell leftover cooking fumes as if they were particulate matter in a pillow spray. Rotting seaweed from the other end of the beach. The breakfast breath of a shop assistant. Chip fat across an A-road. Postmix syrup and pub carpet seeping into the street.

Pregnancy gave me the one superpower no one has ever wanted: an extremely good sense of smell. I was a dog now. Sniffing for danger. Cars on the road sounded louder and appeared more aggressive; I lay awake at 4 o''clock in the morning worrying about the state of the world. My hair came loose. My forehead speckled with zits: bulbous, greasy. I had an urge to eat most of the time. I wanted salty, fatty or sweet food on my tongue.

It gave the slightest relief from the nausea. Soft boiled potatoes. Fizzy cola. Heavy croissants. Crispy bacon and cream cheese. Melted cheese. Salt and vinegar-drenched chips. Salt and vinegar crisps.

Salty tuna covered in mayonnaise. Fizzy orange. Rice and soy sauce and grated mature cheddar. Extra-mature cheddar. Pickled-onion-flavored crisps. On the bus to the British Library in London where I was working on the final edits of my first book, I would nibble oatcakes to suppress the bile climbing up my throat. Visitors are not allowed to bring food into the Reading Rooms so I''d sneak them in under my sleeves and bite secretively as I checked my sources on vulpine biology. As soon as it turned 11 o''clock, I would make my way over the road to the greasiest spoon I could find.

Order a jacket potato with tuna, sweet corn, extra cheese--melted on top, please. Yes, and butter. Yes, mayonnaise on the side. Scatter salt on top. Ring pull click. Fizz. Cold brown cola. I would sit and gorge, ignoring my humiliation at being an early morning gobbler in public.

In return I''d receive twenty minutes of milder nausea. The first trimester wasn''t the healthy time I had aimed for. Fresh salad and vegetables turned my stomach most of all, and I couldn''t swim more than a few lengths in the pool without tiring. One day, I watched a video on the NHS website. "The exercise and the healthy eating will push you in the right direction for a nice, quick labor and a lovely healthy baby at the end of it." A nice, quick labor? That sounded ideal. I''ll get back to healthy eating and exercise soon, I thought. But as I looked on forums and read other women''s accounts, it started to become clear that many were feeling sick round the clock, some throughout pregnancy, and no one knew what caused it, how to treat it properly, or why on earth it was called morning sickness.

- In the late 1980s Margie Profet, a biologist from the United States, developed the hypothesis that pregnancy sickness is an adaptation to protect the growing embryo, particularly at the time of organogenesis. This stage in the development of the fetus is the most vulnerable and susceptible to disruption. Profet''s research suggested that nausea protected the embryo from toxins because it arrests the appetite. A small but interesting study found that women carrying male fetuses have higher levels of disgust and food aversions, because male fetuses are more vulnerable than female. Samuel Flaxman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, built on Profet''s work with a review published in 2000 that supported her hypothesis. Flaxman found that the most common aversions were towards alcohol, meat, eggs, fish and strong-tasting vegetables: foods which would''ve been habitats for microorganisms and toxins in our fridge-less evolutionary history. Strangely, despite the fact that almost 70 percent of women experience pregnancy nausea and vomiting, and severe pregnancy sickness can be fatal for both baby and mother, we still don''t know much more than this. At least the medical establishment no longer believes that pregnancy sickness is the manifestation of immorality.

In the surprisingly recent past, it was blamed on "neurosis, an unconscious desire for abortion, a rejection of motherhood, a scheme to avoid housework, and sexual dysfunction," explains the ecologist Sandra Steingraber in her 2001 book Having Faith: An Ecologist''s Journey to Motherhood. A Scottish physician writing in the 1940s believed that morning sickness could be caused by "excessive mother attachment." Even Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that vomiting in pregnancy was a manifestation of fright at the alienating experience of growing a child within, of being the "prey of the species, which imposes its mysterious laws upon her" and the "conflict between species and individual in the human female." These bizarre ideas were the legacy of the theory of "maternal imagination," which was prevalent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Physicians believed that pregnant women could change the growing fetus with their minds and thus congenital disorders were the fault of the mother. If she was startled by a frog, for example, the child might end up with webbed feet. Or if she spent too long gazing at a picture of Jesus, the baby might come out with a beard. Perhaps there is a residue of the "it''s all in her head" school of thought today.

The long-held idea that women''s bodies and minds are in some way untrustworthy, threatening and subject to whims of irrationality--such as the Ancient Greek belief of the pesky "wandering womb" roving the body causing problems--might explain in part why pregnancy sickness is still not accurately described. But almost every story we''ve been told about the reproductive process is entangled with ideology, with prevailing ideas about gender. I was taught in scie.