I will call my spouse Pink from now on. There’s no deep reason for this other than that he wore pink to our wedding. I don’t know how I’m supposed to choose pseudonyms. On to the actual post:

From about age four to 34, I went through many episodes of the baby fever. They varied in severity and some were more likely to result in a baby than others, but none did until this most recent one. As a result, I had spent 30 years daydreaming and fantasizing about what it would be like to be pregnant and have a child. I still don’t have a child, but as far as pregnancy goes I was utterly wrong on all counts. As a sample, here are two quotes that will go on record as some of the stupidest things I have ever said:

“I’m glad I was born a girl because boys don’t get to experience carrying and giving birth to a baby.” (Said to my mom around maybe age 13.) Well, I would gladly share the carrying part with Pink if I could, and he’d do it too if he could because he’s awesome. I can’t speak from experience on giving birth yet, but it’s unlikely to be the most pleasurable part of the process. Why didn’t women get to have pouches like kangaroos?

“It’s really annoying that I’m pregnant but I don’t feel pregnant at all.” (Said to Pink at about 5 weeks pregnant.) What in the world was I thinking? Here is some advice for you all if you are pregnant and don’t feel pregnant: cherish it, go exercise, enjoy food, get work done, take pictures of yourself in a bikini! It might not last long. In my case it lasted 5 days past the quote above.

To be fair, it’s not the case that I expected pregnancy to be a joyride and instead it sucks. It’s just that both the positives and the negatives, and even the neutrals, are so very different from what I had imagined. Let me count the ways:

Symptoms

I had imagined that symptoms, when they appear, would be big and dramatic, like puking several times a day, and they would somehow represent the momentous thing that is going on inside me. I also thought that while I might be suffering, I would take pleasure in the sympathy I’d get from family and friends. Don’t ask where that last part came from: if I’m sick or injured, I generally do my very best to hide it because I hate it when people feel sorry for me. In fourth grade I once climbed a rope in gym class with a freshly broken wrist. For better or worse, the symptoms I got were of the mildly annoying variety, and nothing really drama-worthy.

For example, I expected nausea to be the main one, maybe because pregnant women in movies tend to be depicted with their heads in toilets. In my case, morning sickness (which has nothing to do with the morning by the way) was fairly mild, and, to be honest, I probably could have avoided most of it had I not spent all of my first trimester travelling and mostly jet-lagged. The jet-lag made the nausea far worse, but even so, it was not so bad on the whole.

On the other hand, I found the un-glamourous and un-dramatic lack of energy – which hardly anyone talks about – to be the biggest challenge. I used to be the person to get work done when it counts, host parties, prepare big dinners and bake elegant desserts, plan weekend trips, go to aerial classes in the evening, exercise and be fit and travel and go hiking and generally do a lot. Pregnancy has put an end to most of that. Jetlag became gruelling, work days seemed endless, aerial classes became discouraging and eventually impossible. For a while I tried to keep things going, hoping for that mythical surge of energy in the second trimester, which never came. Then I slowly gave up and gave in. We no longer go on weekend trips because it would destroy my entire work week after. I now do prenatal yoga once a week, which is much closer to an afternoon nap than to the exercise I used to do, but it’s been helpful nonetheless. We still have a social life, but the last time we hosted a nice dinner I spent an hour in the afternoon in tears because I was so tired I couldn’t enjoy preparing food. Sometimes in the evenings I can’t even sit, and I don’t know what to do with myself lying on the couch and staring at the wall. I bore myself, which gives me a bit of an identity crisis, and an identity crisis is inconvenient when you’re full of hormones that make you cry at the slightest hint of an emotion.

Most recently, partway through my third trimester, I did start to get some life back in me. This would be awesome, if only I could use it for doing something! Unfortunately it came just in time for me to be prohibitively huge, so all that extra energy goes into moving my supersized self through activities of daily living, such as turning over in bed. The most unpleasant surprise about the third trimester has been that sleep deprivation starts before the baby is born. Towards the end there are just a few too many things making you mildly uncomfortable: your hips hurt, your back hurts, and there is this super annoying weird thing called restless legs. I find being unable to sleep rather frustrating, having been a spoiled good sleeper all my life. This has now advanced to be the primary cause of the occasional full-blown sob-fest.

Body image and femininity

I had hoped to be one of those women who would look exactly the same as before but with a cute belly added on. I thought I might feel extra feminine and beautiful. I have indeed been quite fortunate: I haven’t become unrecogniseable, my limbs have not swollen up painfully, the bump is a cute shape if I say so myself, and Pink is having endless fun with my shape-changing belly button. I have to say I’ve enjoyed watching the belly grow, and when people started noticing it I was quite pleased. That said, I don’t feel extra feminine or particularly sexy, and I often miss how my body used to be. (Not to mention the fancy things it could do… sit and walk, jump and climb and pull-ups…)

When I was younger I had gone through a phase or two (or three) when I was perhaps excessively obsessed with my weight or shape, and I have certainly done my share of crash dieting. Over time that obsession gave way to something much healthier: I discovered the pleasure of owning and having control over my body in a positive way. I learned to dance and developed muscles, fitness and endurance. My first pull-up was a major victory: being able to lift my own weight with my arms was a symbol of ultimate control. I had known that pregnancy would make me heavier and probably weaker as well, but the steep decline still took me by surprise. The first to go were cardio fitness and endurance, then muscles, one by one. I have this weird abdominal muscle separation, which means my abs are not strong enough to sit me up in bed. Compared to a few months ago when I could do five inversions (turning myself upside down) while hanging in the air, it’s a big change. I know it will come back with time and work so I don’t worry too much about it, but feeling weak contributes some to the aforementioned identity crisis.

Now here is one embarrassing admission: the boobs. Who knew that pregnancy would double one’s size. Maybe some would consider this a perk, but it hurt! And it makes one’s wardrobe inadequate well before the belly does. I personally had been happy with the original setup and found the process a bit disturbing and quite uncomfortable.

Love, and the best part

Far deeper than misguided expectations about symptoms or body image, my biggest pregnancy misconception was about love. I know different people experience this very differently, and I hope that the way it has been for me doesn’t make me a horrible person. I had always imagined that I would feel overwhelming maternal love for my baby from the minute I see the positive pregnancy test. Instead, staring at the test I felt many things: amazement, anxiety, excitement, disbelief, confusion, but not love. There was nothing to love really: a few cells had burrowed into my uterine wall and set off a hormonal surge which was then detected by a stick I had just peed on. (Did you know that pregnancy forums call this POAS? Peeing On A Stick. Best acronym ever.) It didn’t make for much of a spiritual experience.

The months have since ticked by, and those cells multiplied and formed into something more and more like a baby. New feelings emerged along the way: fascination with this remarkable feat of nature, obsession with the baby’s size and development, excitement and joy when I started feeling movements and even more so when Pink was able to feel them as well. Seeing our baby on the ultrasound screen was probably the coolest hour or so of my life. But it now seems that a prerequisite to love is a relationship, and it has only been in the last trimester that the first, tiniest hints of personality on our baby’s part have started to emerge. We think he might respond to some of the music we play more. (I will refer to ‘him’ as a ‘he’, not as an indication of gender, but because I don’t like ‘it’.) He will sometimes poke me persistently if I lay in a position that restricts his space, and stops when I shift. We sometimes think he responds to his daddy’s voice. All these things have been really fun and made me very happy, but I still wouldn’t call the feeling ‘love’. The knowledge that he will be a child and I will be his mother is still all intellectual, not emotional or visceral in the way I would have expected. I know it will come, I have no doubt that I will love our baby very much, but it’s at least seven months behind my prediction by now.

Here is the best surprise though: love has played an enormous part in this pregnancy experience, but in a completely different way. I had always pictured that being pregnant would be an introspective experience, something between me and the baby, or even just between me and myself. I hadn’t expected the imaginary father of my imaginary child to enter the picture much until around birth, and I could not have been more wrong. For one thing, being pregnant has made me so pathetically helpless that I have become increasingly dependent on Pink, in both practical and emotional ways. For example, he took over our shopping almost entirely: at some point our bank sent me a letter, concerned that I had stopped using my card and offering to educate me on all the fun things I could do with it. Most of these fun things require leaving the house though, a major obstacle. I have become a needy child, and he has been caring for me with more love and tenderness than I had ever expected of a partner or thought I deserved. He has also given me much needed grounding throughout the emotional roller coaster of excitement, frustration and anxieties (all warranted but exaggerated by hormones). In the last couple of months seeing Pink interact with the baby has been one of the most intimate, most satisfying aspects of being pregnant. I love seeing the big smile on his face when he feels the baby kick, and I love when he talks or sings to my belly. I think they will be, and in fact already are, adorable together.

I had imagined that I would feel so close to the baby in my belly, but instead I feel so close to the person who made that baby with me. And if I had to choose now, I would choose this way without a second thought. We both have a lifetime ahead of us to bond with our child, but these are the last few months for a long time of us being together as just a couple. Enjoying each other seems like the best thing we can do right now, both for ourselves and for the little one.

Now I can’t wait to meet this brand new little person that I’ve been dreaming about for 30 years, and probably all those dreams were missing the point too.

Please rave, complain or share advice about pregnancy in the comments!