There are so many things that you don’t get told about pregnancy before you’re pregnant. There’s a lot of things you don’t get told about pregnancy when you are pregnant. There are way too many things you don’t get told.
Your mum, your mum friends, pregnant coworkers, they tell you about the morning sickness and the food cravings, how tired you’re going to get and how swollen your ankles are going to get.
You know what they don’t tell you, that you’re going to keep getting cramps for weeks. Randomly, and they’re going to suck and scare you because you had no idea they were coming. You’re going to have implantation bleeding, which again is going to scare the absolute crap out of you even if you know it’s coming.
You don’t get told that if you know that you’re pregnant during the first trimester then it’s going to be in the back of your mind that you’re at a higher risk of losing that baby for the first twelve weeks. You don’t get told that somedays that’s all you can think about, that the anxiety of doing something that results in you losing the baby you’ve already come to love so much is going to stop you from getting off the couch. It makes you scared to leave the damn house.
You get told that certain foods and smells are going to make you nauseous but you don’t get told that your gag reflex can increase like nobodies business, that you have to find ways to choke down the prenatal vitamins that your body needs. That you’ll choke them down because you have to, but the urge to throw them up can be even stronger.
They tell you that ginger is the magical cure all the morning sickness, but they don’t have any answers when the ginger just makes you more nauseous. They’ve got nothing to say when the pills the doctor gives you to help with your morning sickness don’t do jack either. Or just the thought of crackers coming back up makes you want to puke all over again.
You get told that you’re eating for two, but they don’t tell you that if you actually eat like your eating for two, you get sick. Worse than your normal overdose on ice cream or holiday overeating. Even people who have been pregnant before seem to forget that overeating or eating too fast can make you sick.
Also, if anyone tells you that denying food cravings is going to result in a birth mark on your baby in the shape of the food you denied yourself, they’re wrong, it’s a myth.
They don’t tell you that you could get random pains in your ribs from your body changing and growing. That’s before the baby is even big enough or strong enough to kick you in the ribs.
You get told about the mood swings and the hormones being a real bitch. What they don’t tell you is that you can be fine for weeks and then one night you’re just so tired and worn out and hungry but nauseous that you cry for three hours because the dog knocked over the diet coke you’ve been waiting for all day.
You expect to be tired, hell I was born tired. I used to get through a full day of weekend work with a triple espresso dare and followed it up with a large can of V. Caffeine didn’t have an effect on me anymore, that’s how much I’d ingested over the years to deal with not enough sleep and doing a hundred things at once. I might have been lazy at home, but I made up for it at work. Now I haven’t had coffee for two weeks, before that it was at least a month or two. Like I’m hoping that the placebo effect will kick in.
What you don’t expect is to be so tired that even in your dreams you can barely keep your eyes open. You don’t expect to wake up and have to choose between getting another hour of sleep or eating something, so you don’t get nauseous. You don’t expect to get a full nine or ten hours of sleep just to wake up even more exhausted than if you got only five. You don’t expect to lay on the couch for six hours on your day off and not even realise where the day went, to not have the energy to yell at the dogs for fighting in the house.
They don’t tell you about the guilt you’re going to feel. Not the mum guilt about going back to work or leaving your child with someone else. No, I’m talking about the guilt that comes with being too sick to stay at work. Feeling guilty because you’re dizzy after being upright for thirty minutes. They don’t tell you that even though you’re worried as hell that you’re going to eat or do something that hurts the baby, you still feel guilty for having to take time off from work.
People around you who understand, they’ll tell you that it’s okay, that you need to take care of yourself and the baby. You’ll know, in your head that it’s okay that you had to stay home for a week because you were throwing up and dizzy and could barely move your ass off the couch, because the predator baby inside you is leeching off your body. But it won’t feel like it’s okay. You feel like you’re letting people down. You feel useless and lazy. You feel like a waste of time and space and energy.
Then there are the good days.
The days when you feel a little better than the day before. You haven’t thrown up and the nausea went away or didn’t come at all. The days when you woke up and didn’t feel like you’d been hit by a truck. The days when you ate just enough that you stopped being hungry but not too much that you felt sick.
The days when you find that perfect piece of furniture for the babies room and you weren’t even looking. The days when you come home from work to find that your partner has cleaned the whole house and caught up on the parenting/baby book. The mornings when you wake up and the cat is cuddled against you, with their head pressed to your stomach, almost like they’re saying hello to the baby. The dogs are calm and don’t jump on each other while they’re in the house.
I’m still in week 15 so there’s probably going to be a lot more things I discover that people haven’t warned me about. Hell, maybe the second trimester isn’t going to be the nauseous shitshow that the first was. At least I know that out of the last…107 days, I’ve had about…20 that weren’t marred by nausea, anxiety or exhaustion.
Maybe I’ll be able to get a few more than that in this second round.
S.J Smith Books 