Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Things No One Told Me

I started this post a few months ago but never published it because I was 8 weeks pregnant and we had yet to announce anything to the internet at large. Keep in mind this was written in the throes of 24-hour-a-day morning sickness, before I discovered Zofran, the Miracle Drug, so if I sound a little bitter/crazy...that's why.

“Morning” sickness is an urban legend.

Okay, to be fair, I had heard that morning sickness wasn’t necessarily confined to the morning. But I thought, “Eh, a little nausea won’t hurt me; I’ll be pregnant! I’ll be invincible! I won’t be able to think about anything besides how happy I am to be growing a human!” Lord in Heaven; please forgive me for being such a naïve little fawn. Now I spend most of my time balled up on my couch in the fetal position*, wailing and gnashing my teeth.

Grocery shopping is impossible.

I usually go grocery shopping once a week, mostly because I can’t stand to go to Walmart any more often than that. At the beginning of week 6, I bought groceries for the week as usual, and then about twenty four hours later, the “morning” sickness set in and I realized that everything I had bought for the week was absolutely repulsive. This feeling now applies to most foods, with one mystery exception each day. The problem is, I never know ahead of time what’s going to sound good, so I now have to go to the grocery store every damn day. (Oh who am I kidding; GARY has to go to the grocery store every damn day. Love you honeyyyy.)

How hard it is not to tell people.

Okay seriously? All I want to do is tell people. I understand the wisdom in waiting until you’re out of the first trimester, but it’s kind of hard to focus on anything else when something you’ve wanted for years finally happens. Every time someone asks me how I'm doing, I just wanna shout, "PREGNANT! I'M DOING PREGNANT!" But I hold back because that would be both socially and grammatically inappropriate.

How hard it is to tell people.

Ahh, the dirty flipside of my shiny new coin. A little background info: I have wanted to get pregnant since we got married, but we decided that waiting two to four years would be smart so that we could have that time as just the two of us, and also maybe so we could get our finances in order. So in my mind, that meant we would get pregnant after two years. But when our two (and three and four) year anniversary rolled around, we still weren’t financially ready. Meanwhile, lots of my friends were getting pregnant. I was honestly happy for each of them, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t lock myself in the bathroom and sob every time I saw another pregnancy announcement. And so it was that each time I told one of my childless friends, my excitement was crushed by feelings of guilt and fear that my news might be causing them the same pain I'd felt so many times.

How long it takes.

Gosh, it turns out that 40 weeks is a lot of weeks. I can’t explain why I didn’t see this part coming. I guess I just thought the whole process would be more microwave than oven. I’m not even halfway there and I feel like I’ve been pregnant forever. Come on November! Get here already!

*Hey! That sort of makes sense!

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