Motherhood

No one ever told me what pregnancy would really be like. Movies didn't, and the women in my life who have gone through it didn't. And truthfully, pregnancies are as varied as our fingerprints, so how could anyone really prepare you for it?

No one told me that when I found out I was pregnant I would would be so shocked that I would actually feel numb and lost, like a leaf floating in a gust of wind. I can't say why I felt that way, I just did. I had talked about kids with my partner prior to even thinking I might be pregnant and we had agreed that while we were taking certain precautions, should I end up pregnant it wouldn't be a bad thing.

Yet here I was sitting on the bathroom floor in disbelief, and at a loss for words. As I went throughout my day wondering how I would tell my lover who had been expressing a desire for children regularly, I found myself inexplicably nervous. When he got home tired and just wanted to nap for a bit I was relieved to have more time. In the end I unceremoniously just showed him the multiple sticks I peed on when he woke up, and I could not have anticipated his reaction. It was a rollercoaster of excitement and fear, which truthfully did not help my own mental and emotional state.

I knew I wanted this baby, I just didn't feel excited. And that was hard to make sense of.

Because of recent changes to my cycle and similar symptoms to my period, I was 8 weeks pregnant when I realized I was pregnant. Those first weeks didn't feel too crazy, I just felt what I thought were pre-period cramps, tender breasts, and insanely sleepy by 8pm. All things I could easily deal with, then came the nausea, and you know they really should stop calling it morning sickness because it lasts all day. I was too scared to eat or drink anything.

To top it all off my emotions were completely thrown off their delicate balance. Things I would normally cry for made me feel nothing and things that should have been nothing felt heartbreaking, world ending.

I spent most of my time secluded at home and when I did go out into the world my family would just tell me how worried they were by how sickly I looked. Then when I entered my second trimester and was able to eat I was told I was glowing, even though I didn’t feel like it. My emotions were still all over the place and I didn’t feel myself though at least I was able to stomach food.

Getting to feel my baby move I side me was not what I thought it would be. At first I couldn’t tell if it was him or just had to be honest. Eventually, as he and I got bigger, I came to be able to tell them apart. This also came with more physical discomfort and comments on making sure I didn’t get too big.

In all the noise of commentary around me, no one told me I would feel so drained and overwhelmed. No one said it was ok and normal.

Everyone said, “Enjoy it, this is the easy part.”

The thing is it didn’t feel easy, not by a long shot.

When I got to my third trimester I thought, finally, I am in the last leg of this and then we are done. We are almost on the other side.

But this stage came with the stress of preparing for delivery, and that pulled the worst out of my partner. Consumed by his stress and fear about possible complications he pushed me to do all of the things. Anything the internet said could prepare for easy delivery I was doing. From red raspberry tea and dates to curb walking and yoga, I did it all, in excess I felt. The week we were due to deliver I ate every gluten-free labor inducing food we could find. At one point he tried to force me to down 40 labor I fixing cookies in one sitting, which doesn’t sound bad but when you barely have space in your body for your organs it is torture. I also spent hours on the yoga ball and got more than my usually daily steps in everyday.

I was running out of steam and my baby was more than happy to postpone his arrival. With a week past my due date come and gone we were scheduled for a hospital induction, which was a real downer since we had hoped for a natural and unmedicated labor.

I won’t bore you with every grueling detail of our induction experience because I was in labor for 82 hours. Long story short, it was an emotional rollercoaster. I laughed, got excited, disappointed, we filed a complaint against a doctor; I cried and screamed, but in the end I got my baby. I was so exhausted by the time I got to hold him though and that kind of put a haze on the whole experience for me. That and I was drugged up which was the exact opposite of the plan we had in mind, but then, literally nothing went to plan.

I wish someone had told me I would cry uncontrollably just as much, maybe a smidge more, as I would laugh through pregnancy, labor, and delivery.

I wish someone would have told me that I would feel overwhelmed and yet also unproductive. I wish they would have said that it was ok, and I was doing enough already.

I wish someone would have told me you could do all the things and still things might not go to plan. I wish they would have said don’t stress out, you’ve done enough, it’s not your fault if things happen differently.

I wish someone would have said, yes it is going to get harder but that doesn’t mean this is easy, so it’s ok to not feel ok.