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Today is May 18, 2012

Pregnancy - Adding On

Um, what? You want me to keep doing this? HA HA…oh wait, I want to.

The Truth About Pregnancy (cont)

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…all the sickness would help me not gain the 30 to 45 pounds I tend to gain, but it does not. I crave lovely light and healthy things like pizza grease (yes, you read that right) avocados — which taste better with mayonnaise (again, not kidding), butter and cream cheese. And my favorite: the Dorito sandwich. It helps with the nausea. If you want the recipe, e-mail me and I’ll be happy to share. So while I lose half of what I eat through the first half of this trimester, all I can eat is pure fat, so well, I get fat.

The second half of the second trimester is really hard on my ego. As I start to come out of the fog of morning sickness, I realize I’m quite unattractive. I want to make a shirt that says, “I’m not fat, I’m pregnant.” (If any of you make that shirt, I get 50% of the revenue — just sayin’.) Because you can’t really tell I’m pregnant yet, I just look plump. It’s not easy for me to go through that. I know I shouldn’t care about my looks, but I do, I can’t help it. I’ve been a dancer all my life, I love looking great in jeans, and well, duing this time I look frumpy, fat and swollen. But my baby bump isn’t big enough to warrant the “awww” and “you look so cute!” comments that we all enjoy around the sixth and seventh month.

Oh yeah. And this is when the sneezing, coughing and laughing produce small amounts of pee. Yeah, that’s lovely. So now I feel fat, unattractive and I pee on myself.  Real and honest people, real and honest (and go ahead and laugh at my expense too, I’m cool with it).

Then comes the trimester that I think we have to go through in order to be willing to go through labor: the daunting and horrific third trimester. This is when body parts that should not ever touch, touch. My thighs should never meet my belly, that’s just not right. And to have my boobs rest on my belly while my belly rests on my thighs is just an awful feeling. It’s just flat out weird. In fact, as I type this in my ninth month, I actually have to sit with my legs apart, because my belly is in the way.

And the heartburn, can we talk about the heartburn? I actually have to spend this trimester sleeping sitting up. If I do slide down the pillows I use to prop myself up, I wake up with acid in my mouth. No, I’m not kidding. I really wish I was. So I keep a bottle of Tums by my bed at night, just in case I make the mistake of slipping down the pillows while I sleep. I’ve tried the vinegar pills, eating crackers, ice cream and drinking water. The only thing that works is staying as vertical as possible. It’s not like I sleep anyway. My hips hurt, the baby gets the hiccups (it’s cute — can’t sleep through them, but it’s cute), my leg falls asleep or well, there is just a level of insomnia that comes when one is this big.

So, basically, for me, it’s ten months (Yes, ten. Forty weeks, four weeks in a month, it’s ten months. Anyone who says it’s not is lying.) of really feeling awful physically, a bruised ego, very odd fat cravings and a lot of discomfort. I will be honest and say that labor is fairly easy for me. So I’ll leave that article to someone else. For me labor is a joy. I don’t mean the actual contractions (my husband can share the war stories about my bad mouth and foul attitude during contractions), I mean knowing that the end of the pregnancy is near and that I get to meet my baby soon. I really do take those first contractions to be the light at the end of the tunnel. I know that once I feel those, I will soon be the only person in my body. And that is a good thing.

So when I hear Heidi Klum talk about how wonderful it is to be pregnant and how she doesn’t give a second thought to the 45 pounds she gains while under the public eye, I think, “Well, good for her.” OK OK…I think that after I go through a litany of negative thoughts and bouts of jealousy, but I do think it. I wish I was like that, but I’m not. I’m so not.

But like Ms. Klum, I love being a mom. My beautiful children are worth the pain, the discomfort, the fat, the post-partum struggle with weight loss, the sore boobs, the stretch marks, the months of vomiting, the sleepless nights (even before they’re here) and the acid in my mouth. I just wish that someone had told me how hard it really is, so I could have been better prepared.

And that, my friends, is why I wrote this article. You can now say that you’ve been told. You’ll forget that I told you, and you’ll cry and be angry and claim that no one told you, but at least I can know that I tried. And as you crawl up your stairs to sleep at 7:30 at night, or you cry after you’ve thrown up for the third time in a day, I hope that some memory of this article will come floating back to you and you will know that you’re not alone.

And for those of you, who like Heidi Klum, that have wonderful pregnancies, my hope is that this article fills you with gratitude and joy. You are lucky, and I, for one, am incredibly jealous and happy for you.

To our kids.

Author: Sarah

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