The Truth About Pregnancy

It was an unusually mild summer.

It seemed as though it had taken forever to get warm enough to go outside without a jacket or even a sweatshirt without causing a bout of full body shivering. Perhaps I was just running colder than normal due to a surgery I had just a few months prior.

I was thinking about how my birthday would be different this year. When the lock down began, shortly after I started my new job and was then thrust into working from home just 3 days later, I had imagined that everything would be back to normal by the time June rolled around.

What I didn't know was that my birthday was going to be different this year for a completely different reason than I was anticipating.

For anyone who has struggled with fertility issues, life as it relates to the ability to reproduce has a different "normal" than what most people are used to. There is no fear of accidentally creating a life you didn't set out to create; no repercussions of straying from the faithful usage of birth control methods for every romp in the hay with your monogamous partner. You've been down this road before and it always has and probably will always end the same way: with you continuing to remain childless.

So imagine my surprise that after thirteen years of being sexually active that I was staring down a ClearBlue pregnancy test; anxiously awaiting the results.

I paced in and out of my bathroom, waiting for the timer to go off on my phone. It was the only way to keep myself from watching the built in timer on the test count down.

Suddenly, the annoying sequence of beeps sounded to let me know that it was time. I anxiously walked back into the bathroom, fixing my eyes straight ahead to stop from betraying myself.

Pregnant.

The news felt like truck had hit me. How could I be pregnant again so soon? I had just experienced the emotional roller coaster of a chemical pregnancy the month before; was I really ready for this?

The truth is, you're never ready.

As a first time parent, I am experiencing pregnancy for the first time and all of the visceral details that go into creating a new life. I think one of the most jarring experiences of becoming pregnant was not any individual symptom, but rather the gross misinformation about how women experience pregnancy. Pregnancy is touted as this magical time full of hopes and dreams and cute onesies that may be speckled with some temporary discomfort by the way of swollen ankles and morning sickness for a few weeks.

What no one tells you, is that growing another human is a disgusting, tiring, uncomfortable and sometimes painful process.

Pregnancy for myself, and many women, turns quickly from a time of excitement and hopes and dreams to a gauntlet to see how long your mental fortitude can stand up against the onslaught of physical symptoms the continuous surge of hormones creates in your body. I have had a relatively easy and complication free pregnancy, despite experiencing both acute appendicitis in my first trimester and a kidney stone in my third trimester. Both of which, by the way, are conditions that are said to be comparable, if not more painful, than labor. I'll have to report back once I cross that bridge.

Along with the physical aspect, I was not prepared for the emotional aspect of pregnancy. PMS for me, when I actually did get it, was never as intense as the anxiety, sadness, irritability, and joy that I have experienced during my pregnancy, sometimes all within a few minutes of each other. The first trimester was by far the hardest emotionally due to the daily struggle that morning sickness created. I dont know of anyone who tolerates being nauseous well, and for me, it spanned a whole 10 weeks. Many women experience it for longer and in a much more intense manner.

In the trenches of the first trimester, I frequently found myself contemplating abortion. Prolonged pain and discomfort has a way of wearing at your will to push onward. I didn't know that what I so desperately needed was to feel like I wasn't alone. That someone else was as invested as I was. That someone other than me wanted this baby.

I had to learn how to communicate this to my husband.

It seems so simple, but honestly, it is only because I am describing my feelings in hindsight that everything sounds so concrete. Trying to pinpoint emotions you don't understand is like trying to write a book about a subject you know nothing about. Once I learned the words to articulate what I was feeling to him, the anxiety stopped. The crying spells became fewer and far between. And the constant nausea was easier to handle because I wasn't trying to solve the emotional puzzle while physically barely getting through the day.



There is this sense of comraderie with other mothers and mothers to be that I haven't experienced with other prominent life stages. There is something about being in the trenches of pregnancy and new motherhood that bonds you to complete strangers and even generations of mothers far older and more experienced than you. You feel a strong connection with these women; your new tribe of warriors that have brought life and continue to keep the Earth spinning. It's this indescribable feeling of being part of something much larger than yourself, more than setting foot into a house of worship ever did for me. I am one with the women from hundreds or thousands of years ago that grew a child inside her body for a long forty weeks, who then went on to become somebody.

This is something else the baby books and the What to Expect app didn't and couldn't have prepared me for.

At the end of the day, pregnancy is one of the craziest but most rewarding things I've gone through. (This is coming from someone who once took a joy ride at in their mother's car while they were gone on vacation to meet up with a boyfriend). There is nothing that compares to feeling the little person inside you move around as they explore their body and temporary living quarters. Or how many times he makes you laugh out loud from tickling you from the inside as he runs his feet up and down the side of your uterus.

Perhaps pregnancy does deserve a little bit of its magical reputation.