My husband has many videos of me monologing, “Never forget what I am about to tell you. Pregnancy sucks. Do not do this again.”
And yet, a few months after giving birth, the insane, primal part of me was already going, “I’ll be better at it next time! It was cool getting to wear voluminous silhouettes and embracing new feminine archetypes! We can just stay in SF/NYC during the next pregnancy so there’s more walkable food!” I felt I’d squandered my pregnancy. I should’ve savored everything more, somehow.
So before everything gets totally distorted by rose colored evolutionary adaptions, it’s time to finally put on the internet record my experiences of pregnancy, and to-be-posted accounts of labor and breastfeeding.
When we got engaged, I drew the vision I wanted to manifest— me and my husband in an architectural marvel with our dog, cat, and baby— and put the drawing on our bedroom wall.
My husband said, “The baby looks like a boy.”
“Oh, you’re right. I don’t really know what babies look like. Should I change it? Everyone in my family is a girl, so it’ll probably be a girl.”
My husband shrugged, then got excited. “We’re doing it! We’re getting married and we’ll have a kid and buy a house. This could all come true this year!”
“Yes, including the cat!” My old cat died last year, but I put a cat in the drawing because I wanted another. My husband was against this because he wanted a pet-free period, and also felt the cat stole my attention, so I often teased him by threatening to get a cat unilaterally.
My husband retorted, “Actually, this baby looks at least a few years old.”
6 months later, my husband and I stood in our bathroom arguing over a tiny ladle of my urine.
“You’re not doing it right,” my husband said. “You have to wait exactly 10 minutes. I put this timer here expressly for this purpose. After you dip the strip into pee, you flip the timer over—”
“Why would that matter? And both that fertility book and my OB said we shouldn’t use the test strips because they’re unreliable.”
“You never believe me. I researched this and the timer really matters for the test result. If we’re doing this, can we do it right? Your way isn’t working.”
“I don’t find this fun. Why can’t this be easy and romantic?”
“Because it’s hard and arduous. People try for years to conceive. Someone else just told me they wish they’d gotten hormone injections sooner— would’ve saved them a year. Best case scenario, I’ll be in my 60’s by the time our kid’s an adult, and then I’ll be dead! You’ll get the injections next month?”
“It’s scheduled,” I ground out. “I’m over here wearing crazy lingerie, logging our sex and my cervical fluid in an app, testing my pee every few hours, cross referencing my basal body temperature, and scheduling hormone injections, while you’re criticizing me. Why don’t you time the test strips?”
I didn’t expect my husband to do it, but he loves timing things and following product instructions. So now every time I went to the bathroom, he joined me to test my pee with his new gadget. He was so sincerely meticulous about it that I almost felt bad for making him do it, but I also felt like he should have to put in work too, even if it didn’t make sense logistically or biologically.
Later, we found out that, the first time we had sex after my husband took over using his timer method, I got pregnant.
I didn’t find out I was pregnant till I was 6 weeks in. I hadn’t seen my husband in weeks because I was traveling, which can delay my period.
I only eventually realized I was pregnant because I suddenly felt like shit. Exhausted, drifting on the border of consciousness, I couldn’t even sleep because I felt so nauseous and sore. With a week in SF, I’d had plans to go to Barry’s Bootcamp, museums, and my old haunts, but instead I just lay in bed at Doug and Deena’s house. I ordered another COVID test.
Almost on a whim, I also ordered a pregnancy test.
The results came in: negative on COVID, positive on pregnant…!
I was more relieved than anything. I’d been scared I wouldn’t be able to do it. But now it had happened.
We did it! I did it, and I didn’t even need hormone injections! My husband was so excited, he rushed home from a party, bringing an assortment of groceries I decided I needed, along with his own innovative solutions for nausea.
A day after realizing I was pregnant, I became clear on what I wanted: a community that revolved around me and my house. I saw that even though I’d moved to Hawaii, I still visited SF every 2 months because I was scared to let it go, scared that I’d never have the friends in Hawaii that I had in SF. Out of fear and scarcity, I was maintaining a community that revolved around SF instead of around me, which was leading me to stay in various groups that no longer fit my life. I didn’t want to do that anymore.
Although it was scary for me to leave groups that I’d been in for years and had changed my life and had so many favorite people, I saw I wanted to let them go so I could make space for the unknown new community that was what I really wanted, but had been too scared to admit to myself. Nausea made it clear to me that I didn’t have space for anything that wasn’t exquisite. It made it easy for me to cut the crap, because the thought of traveling or even leaving my house made me want to vomit. Anything that wasn’t a community centered around me was barf worthy. Pregnancy gave me the gift of nausea, a signal to show what I really wanted.
Another pregnancy gift was an overriding sense of contentment. Almost immediately, I saw that I was enough. I deleted everything with a news feed because I didn’t need the adrenaline or dopamine anymore now that I was hopped up on pregnancy hormones. Although I’d always known intellectually that I was “enough,” now I deeply felt in my body the truth that I didn’t have to do anything.
In the past, no matter what I’ve achieved, I’ve always felt like I needed to climb a new mountain. The idea of underperforming my potential seemed sacreligious, disgusting, and at least embarrassing. Ambition was good, complacency was evil, grow or die. But now I saw that nothing mattered. I am enough.
I have a long list of pregnancy pains, which I was naively surprised by because I’m used to escaping unscathed from everything. I spent the first 4+ months of pregnancy lying in the dark with AC blasting and watching reality tv. Now I wonder, was I depressed? I definitely wasn’t normal.
After spending hours trying to eat the most bland foods, only to barf it all up right before bed, I told my husband, “This must be what leukemia was like, where you wanted to eat but couldn’t because you were so nauseous.”
My husband frowned. “No, cancer is way worse.”
“You don’t know that. I can’t even sleep because I wake up starving and then I have to stuff food down my maw in the darkness even though the feeling of anything in my mouth makes me gag. Even brushing my teeth makes me gag. And I have plaque buildup because of pregnancy saliva shit.” On my bedstand, I kept what I called my “night nuts” and my “night sweet potato.”
“Do you have anal fissures?” he retorted.
“No, but some pregnant women get it, and I have shooting pain up my butt. They call it lightning crotch. I have so much random shooting pain. I can’t even lay on my back because then my uterus pushes against the nerves in my back which makes me dizzy and unable to breathe. As soon as the doctor makes me lie back for the exam, I start panting and blacking out. I can’t lie on my left side either because then my uterus pushes against some organ and because of my rib flare and I get stabbing pains. So I can only lie on my right side, not that I can sleep anyway because of pregnancy insomnia. Incessant stabbing pains are just normal for me now.”
Pregnancy is not the same as wearing a weighted suit because the weight is inside the body, pushing up against the organs, which affects those organs’ ability to function. Previously normal movements or barely noticeable acts like eating, drinking, digesting, and pooping now caused constant aches and shooting pains.
Powering through nausea to eat, barfing up everything that took hours to eat and having to start all over, waking up starving to chug olive oil, not being able to eat a lot at once because my stomach was being compressed from below by my growing uterus and thus having to eat small amounts constantly, getting heartburn because hormones were making my esophageal muscles unable to keep stomach acid down, stabbing pains in my pelvis and butt, radiating pain in my back and legs, having to use k tape to tape up my stomach so that it wasn’t causing stabbing pain in my pelvis through the ligaments stretching, getting bruises from removing the k tape because my belly skin was so thin and stretched, chafing and rashes under my boobs from my expanding boobs rubbing against my expanding stomach— so many ailments that I couldn’t keep up.
Finally, I had to surrender to my body. It was a role reversal from my usual mentality of using my body as a tool. Time was my ally. I kept reminding myself: everything is temporary. If I just wait, all this will end, one way or another.
So I spent much of pregnancy panting, struggling to breathe while bemoaning my huge thorax, trying to force food down despite my nausea, breathing through various radiating and shooting pains, and trying to devote myself more to my body, with limited success. For 8 months, I couldn’t take a full breath because the baby pushed against my diaphragm.
For the last few months, he was kicking against my ribs, diaphragm, and bladder, especially in the evening or if I drank juice, which was both cool and horrible. The killer was inside the house.
The body can get used to anything though, and after a while I got used to constant stabbing pains, shortness of breath, reflux, etc.
“This is how my baby will feel,” I thought. “The baby will have issues keeping food down, eating, sleeping, pooping, everything. This is just the pain of being alive and having a body, and I’m enduring this so I can empathize more with the baby.”
Eating was so hard that I weighed less at 5 months pregnant than when I got pregnant. Frozen things had less odor so were easier to eat. All day, I’d try to eat frozen bread and popsicles. Scouring reddit for ideas, I bought every food imaginable and logged my food and calories to try to cross correlate to figure out what decreased barfing.
Amit bought a fancy ice cream maker so that he could make salad and protein shakes— my pre-pregnancy staple foods— into ice cream.
“How’s the salad protein ice cream?” he’d ask me after each new concoction. After my answer, he’d triumphantly reveal with glee, “I added olive oil to it!”
Every month, I’d have a meltdown and sob to Amit about how much I hated pregnancy, how I was scared I wasn’t getting enough nutrients for myself or the baby, how the doctors scared me and didn’t care about my health.
Although we did the parenthood class at the hospital, I wasn’t preparing for the future. I was focused on the day to day of pregnancy and my own sensations, not the baby.
“The baby is me,” I said. “I take care of the baby by taking care of me. Which is why I need to buy myself more jewelry.”
My husband and I had different nesting modes: I started rearranging furniture and buying things, whereas he started reorganizing the kitchen, forcing us to finish forgotten foods, and labeling things.
Our house came furnished so nothing is as we would’ve chosen for ourselves, and we weren’t ready to invest in a rental, especially because furniture takes forever to ship to Hawaii. I compromised by buying pillow covers and hiding the furniture that came with the house with random sheets.
“Should we buy a changing table?” my husband asked me.
“No. I don’t want to buy anything for the baby. We can change him on the ground.” (Indeed, for the first month, we used a puppy pad to change him on the guest bed.)
“Should we buy a snoo?”
“If you want. But he can sleep on Leah’s dog bed like Jesse’s baby.”
After we eventually bought a changing table and all the normal things, and lots of random other stuff, eventually my husband realized, “I should just buy whatever I want without asking you because you always lag me by a few months.”
The fact is, until after I gave birth, I wasn’t ready for the baby. My own inner child was having a tantrum clinging to the status quo and scared of giving up her role as the only baby.
On our 3rd date, I made Amit promise that we’d always prioritize each other above our kids. “If there’s a choice between 1% probability of saving my life and 100% probability of killing the kid, you have to choose me. We can always make more kids. And ideally they’ll eventually move out of the house whereas we’ll be together forever.” Having to sacrifice myself for needier/ more aggressive kids was an existential fear that came from my infancy, and pregnancy was triggering this fear.
When my due date came and went, everyone started talking about inductions. I said, “I’m scared of escalating interventions and potentially having a C section.”
People said, “It’s fine; people have C sections all the time.”
Amit stood up for me, “She doesn’t want a C section.”
I cried, touched that Amit cared about me, and scared that no one else did.
I realized my indifference towards babies had actually been fear and envy. I wanted to be the baby!
Whenever people assumed I’d sacrifice my comfort or wellbeing for the baby, my inner child wept, “What about me?” Abandoned and hurt in the past, she was scared of the indifferent world that’d moved on.
I told her, “It’s ok. That makes sense. Things are changing. But I’ll always stick up for you. You don’t have to pay attention to other people.”
When surely well meaning people dismissed my feelings and projected onto me, “It doesn’t matter if you tear,” or, “You won’t care about xyz after you give birth,” I very calmly muttered under my breath, “How about you go F* yourself?” which is uncharacteristic of me but something I needed to do for my inner child.
Finally, my inner child met my future son and made peace with other babies. Now she’s happy to have a new playmate and finds everything he does hilarious.
Other revelations due to pregnancy:
- Due to increased blood flow and hormones, orgasming became super easy! I’d have sex dreams and could orgasm without anything, which had never happened before.
- A related revelation that came from giving birth was the sensation of my womb. I’d only vaguely felt my womb before via period pains, but during labor I felt it moving, which hadn’t happened before. So many new features unlocked! Now I still feel it (and I think other new stuff) when I orgasm. It’s crazy how little anyone understands about female anatomy.
- Physically, as my silhouette changed, I took the opportunity to embrace other feminine forms of beauty. I’d never worn clothes that weren’t fitted around the waist, but now I embraced weird shapes and structures. Looking at old photos of my mom, I newly appreciated her stylishness and saw how it informed my own sense of fashion. I view my pregnancy as key to my style evolution and appreciating my mom.
- I felt connected to all mothers. I’d never really been interested in the mother archetype before, but it’s the universal human experience of all our ancestors. I felt fascinated that this was how humans were made, and that we were doing it. Reddit gave me so much solace. Old me would’ve said the average redditor is an idiot. New me loves the wisdom of idiots.
- I felt more appreciation for Amit. When we found out we were having a boy, I immediately hoped he’d be a mini-Amit. Prior to pregnancy, I wanted kids to glorify my ego. Now that urge melted away without a word. All I wanted was more of my husband Amit, my favorite person. I don’t need greatness or immortality. I only need my family, and to buy things online whenever I want.
Initially I’d told Amit I wanted to use a surrogate but he pitched that he would rub my feet and bring me food. He did feed me, but it wasn’t the Chinese food I was craving, and it was obvious he wasn’t that into massaging me.
Instead, my favorite parts of pregnancy turned out to be unexpected!
- I loved our photoshoot. Amit said, “Let’s wait till you’re really huge,” so we waited till I was 9 months pregnant! I don’t know if I have any other photos of me in a bathing suit but pregnancy gave me new levels of comfort with showing my body in all its forms.
- I love clothes and shopping. I didn’t buy too many maternity clothes, but rather explored designers who had never appealed to me before because they weren’t sexy, pretty, or romantic, but rather oversized, confusing, and weird.
- Our friends were in a big chat group that bet on the birth date (my mother in law won! I scheduled and canceled 2 inductions which threw the betting chat into chaos) and suggested baby names. We said we wanted our baby to commune with the divine, care for us when we were old, and to have a unique name reminiscent of an unhinged celebrity baby. There were so many sincere ideas proposed that would inevitably devolve into nerd puns. Ultimately, Amit came up with the name while talking with one of the chat friends. Even after we put it on the birth certificate, which they pressured us to do ASAP because they needed a name to put on insurance forms, we were like, “Did we really name him this?” We almost never use his first name though and call him by his middle name. His middle name is inspired by one of my GETCO friends who I call Fraba but who Amit remembered as Baba, which is incidentally Fraba’s actual last name.
- My enneagram 7 loves the novelty of pregnancy. On top of all the new features and sensations, now I know more about what various chronic ailments feel like and can relate more to the breadth of human experience. Basically the body breaking down sucks and is generally invisible to outsiders so they keep forgetting it’s painful for you to lie down or stand or breathe.
More to come on breastfeeding! I also wrote about labor, the first month postpartum, and my first mother’s day as a mom.
