Review of Knocked Down: A High-risk Memoir by Aileen Weintraub

By joj

Word count: 730

I thought Knocked Down: A High-risk Memoir was about Aileen Weintraub’s doctor-prescribed five months of pregnancy bed rest. The book is arranged by gestational time (weeks of pregnancy) so readers can watch the time tick by oh so slowly. I’ve had several high-risk pregnancies myself which also involved bouts of ordered bed-carceration that were nearly as perilous as the reasons I was told to hunker down. You think you’d love to be commanded to sleep in all day every day until it happens to you. Just the premise of the book was triggering, but I wanted to see how a person who is a self-proclaimed “runner”–someone who takes off for the hills at the first sign of trouble–would survive half a pregnancy in physical and mental limbo.

But Aileen’s story isn’t only a quilt of loneliness, boredom, and physical/marital/financial precarity stitched with humor, candor, and approachability. It took me most of the book to understand that Knocked Down was actually about me and my marriage.

I’ve been trying to leave my partner off and on for twenty years. In early March of 2020, I was away from home finishing up my final year of grad school. He and I had reached a happy truce, a place where we were both committed to trying again. Upon graduation I would get my own apartment. We would date each other, try to find whatever it was that brought us together in the first place, for the sake of our four children. Covid lockdown threw a wrench into this plan, forcing me to move back into our home early, still in the throes of grad school. After a honeymoonesque reunion, the relationship started to crumble again. As usual I wanted to bolt, but local (French) laws forbade me from going farther than 100 kilometers. I felt panicked and trapped, powerless to run.

When Aileen is bedridden, the health and survival of her unborn child trumps all feelings of the kind of panic that usually causes her to quit whatever she’s committed herself to and run to the next exciting thing for a while. She is forced to turn and face something she’s been fleeing for years: processing the death of her father, her childhood hero and accomplice in playfully torturing her mother. The memory of their funny pranks start to fade, contrasted with the realization that his inability to hold down a steady job and his prolonged periods of lethargy might be symptoms of depression. Did she inherit this from him? Is that why she’s always running from boredom, why she uses humor to downplay the seriousness of catastrophes? Is this something she will pass on to her child? Iterative micro-crises in her pregnancy, marriage and finances have her reaching out to her mother for comfort and compel her to reflect on her father-daughter relationship, his now undeniable depression, and the effect their complicity had on her mother. As Aileen’s mom shows up to love her through this passage in the only way she knows how–with suitcases full of meat (Aileen is a vegetarian)--she learns to appreciate her mother’s silent strength, leans on it to inform her own future parenting.

With nowhere to go, lockdown gave me no choice but to reconsider my marriage. I was still justified in some of my complaints, but for once, the possibility of one of us catching (and dying from) covid made me look at the ways in which I had contributed to the woes of our relationship. My partner wasn’t the only villain. My own traumatic past had turned me into a ruthless and unforgiving perfectionist, ready to bolt at any sign of unfulfilled expectations in the name of righteous indignation. In lockdown, I learned to own my part of the responsibility. I opened up to my partner about my willingness to soften, which in turn inspired him to do the same. Things aren’t perfect but I no longer feel like running.

It wasn’t until I finished reading Knocked Down, having watched Aileen slowly, gradually come to the conclusion that she might have not known her father–or herself–as well as she had thought, that I realized lockdown had had the same effect on me. This hilarious book about a terrifying experience made me realize what a gift lockdown had been for me, my marriage and ultimately my children.

From the publisher description of KNOCKED DOWN: A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids.