There's a version of pregnancy that lives in announcements and other people's questions. In that version the feelings are simple: excited and grateful and glowing. Then there's the version that happens inside a person. In that one, you can be genuinely thrilled and still lie awake at 3am with something closer to dread. You can want this baby completely and still grieve the life you have right now.

Because nobody describes the second version out loud, the conclusion most women reach is that something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with them. Pregnancy is emotionally complicated because it's one of the most complicated things a person ever does. It just rarely gets billed that way.

Three renovations at once

Look at what's actually under construction during those nine months, psychologically. Your place in your family, first: whichever pregnancy this is, the family you have is ending and a new one is starting. Your relationship with your partner begins reorganizing around a person who doesn't exist yet, and your relationship with your own parents shifts too — becoming a mother has a way of bringing your experience of being mothered back to the surface, sometimes gently, sometimes not.

Your sense of who you are is under construction too. Psychiatrists use the word matrescence for this — coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael, revived by the psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks — because it's a full developmental transition on the scale of adolescence. The person you've spent decades becoming, with her ambitions, her competence, her body that did what she asked of it, is being revised. Not erased. Revised, without her full consent on the timeline.

And the body doing all of this is running some of the biggest hormonal swings it will ever experience. We extend teenagers automatic grace for what their hormones are doing. A pregnant woman is in the middle of something at least as large, while holding down a job and absorbing everyone else's excitement, and is somehow expected to feel exactly one thing, consistently, for nine months.

Any one of these would be a lot. Pregnancy is all three at once, on a deadline.

Strangers ask if you're excited. Nobody asks if you're ambivalent.

Two feelings at once

For many of the women I see, the difficult feelings aren't the hardest part. The belief underneath them does more damage — the belief that dread means the excitement wasn't real, or that admitting this is hard means you wanted it less. Ambivalence, holding two opposing feelings about the same thing, is the normal emotional signature of every major life transition, and pregnancy is the major life transition. Thrilled and terrified. Certain and grieving. The women who struggle most usually aren't the ones feeling both. They're the ones spending enormous energy hiding it, including from themselves.

If the feelings are near-universal, why does every woman seem to discover them alone at 3am, convinced she's the exception? Partly because the socially available answer to every question is "we're so happy," and whatever doesn't fit that answer goes underground, where it tends to turn into guilt. And partly because attention shifts to the baby so early. Appointments measure the baby; questions are about the baby. The woman whose entire inner world is reorganizing becomes the container for the main event instead of a person in the middle of her own.

When to take it seriously

Complicated is normal, and most of the time it doesn't need fixing. But if the hard feelings are crowding out everything else — anxiety running most of your days, a persistent flatness or hopelessness, or just the wish for one place where you don't have to seem fine — that's reason enough to talk to someone. Pregnancy is also a practical time to start: support built now is already in place for the postpartum months, when it's hardest to go looking.

Short of that, if you're pregnant and confused by your own feelings, let this be the thing someone says to you clearly: you are doing something enormous. Feeling many things about it is what understanding something this big looks like.