To me pregnancy is not beautiful. It’s not glowing. it’s not glamorous and it’s certainly not comfortable.
For me, pregnancy is …
- Getting up 6x a night to pee
- Feeling like you’re losing yourself
- Being told what to do and not do constantly
- Unsolicited advice
- Getting out of bed at 2am to eat toast alone on the couch because you’re starving
- wondering if your stomach muscles are being torn apart as pains wake you at 4am
- Watching your boobs triple in size, and feeling utterly disgusted by it
- Hard
- Harder than you can imagine
- A mental challenge
- Being constipated
- Having no control of your body
- Physically taxing
- Emotionally draining
- Missing your husband in the middle of the night because you now have to sleep in separate rooms due to your unbearable snoring (kindly due to the ligaments relaxing in your throat, another gift of pregnancy)
- Rolling over to eat a muesli bar from your drawer at 1am because you’re too hungry to sleep
- Crying in the middle of the night (yes, a lot of these things do happen at the witching hours of the night) because you’re terrified about your life changing
- Feeling hungry and sick at the same time
- Being so angry that your blood boils when the slightest comment, change to plans or wind blowing in your general direction happens
- Feeling unseen
- Not being heard
- Having to explain how you’re feeling and what you’re going through over and over again
- Tough
- Challenging
- Exhausting
What has pregnancy been like for you?
(written at 30 weeks + 3 days)
I call BS on the glow 
In my case it has been LITERALLY crippling. I am already crippled by a life-long condition I was born with, but had gotten to a state of prime health for my personal body proceeding this pregnancy. The severe fatigue, blood pressure changes, and nausea have caused me to be bed bound for a lot of these weeks (and mind you I’m ONLY 12 weeks along now….) And that has caused my muscles to atrophy and chronic pain to come back in full force. I will require physical therapy when all is said and done. I will likely spend my last trimester back in a wheelchair, something I was able to replace with a rollator a few years ago and have been desperate to avoid since. Walking through Target today left me in the same kind of debilitating pain that I haven’t felt since I first started walking again.
I also feel like I’m in a constant battle between needing to eat an entire elephant and violently puking so hard I piss myself. I literally have emetophobia too, the morning sickness has been pure torture. It’s getting a little better as I near the second trimester, but I’m not naive, I know it will rear it’s ugly head again at all the worst times.
Considering this is a “rainbow” pregnancy for me, it’s hard to enjoy even the good things about being pregnant, because I’m always expecting to lose this baby too. Whenever I’m suffering I always think “this baby BETTER be alive in there if I gotta go through this.” I struggled to conceive again after the miscarriage so this baby is extremely wanted, but I did not expect this second journey to be quite this harrowing. I had been so desperate to get pregnant again I ignored the warnings and they even pissed me off at the time. I get it now, pregnancy DOES suck, no matter how much you want to be pregnant!!!!
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Thank you so much for sharing what you’ve been through. I’m so sorry to hear of your challenges and yes this is something we need to speak about so much more. I see you. I hear you.
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