It’s Ok Not To Glow
Tomorrow I will be 38 weeks pregnant. I sit writing this with a fractured rib while getting an iv iron infusion. This is not what I thought pregnancy would look like for me. This isn’t the story my friends told or the narrative tv and movies has so brilliantly painted for me. It’s supposed to be all about glowing and sweet baby kicks. But what happens when it’s not? There is not really a space to talk about that. I want to change that. So here it is.
A few months back I wrote about my pregnancy and I never shared it. But now that I am coming to the end it feels even more important to say it out loud.
On 8/9 I wrote:
This morning as I laid in bed listening to my toddler talk to my husband in the other room the tears filled in my eyes. I wanted the day to be over before it even began. I’ve never felt that once in my life until this morning. I woke up with the extreme discomfort I went to bed with and couldn’t imagine going through the whole day like that waiting for it to end to lay down and hopefully find some comfort that most likely wouldn't come. This is my pregnancy. It’s been rough and at the core of being really hard for so many reasons, I have then also found it extremely lonely because no one talks about this part. We talk about infertility and postpartum depression but we don’t talk about the pregnancies that are rough. As an expectant mother, I am expected to be elated, grateful, glowing, and beaming with excitement. Don’t get me wrong I am beyond excited and grateful to have the honor of growing a human, a child we wanted but my body has not handled being pregnant the way I had hoped and that is hard. It’s made harder by everyone, mostly women, telling you that it will get better or offering lots of unsolicited advice. Or the person telling you that you should be so grateful because so many people try and can’t have kids or there are so many people who have lost children. I know. I know how lucky I am. I promise we are grateful. We tried for over a year to get pregnant so I understand the frustration that comes along with infertility. I have friends and family that have miscarried so I understand how lucky I am to be carrying a baby, hopefully to term. But that doesn’t negate that pregnancy has been hard and I should be allowed to share that without judgment and without shame. And just maybe if more women did there would be more support. More conversation, and better advice for those of us who are struggling during pregnancy despite wanting to be pregnant.
I’ve asked myself if perhaps my expectations were all wrong and I guess to some extent they were. Knowing my body I always joked I wouldn’t be a good pregnant person. I’m nauseous on a good day, not pregnant, I pee 100x a day and it’s pretty easy for me to gain weight. But no, I did not expect to literally throw up multiple times per day for over 2 months to the point where I lost 15#’s and had to go to the ER for dehydration. And per everyone's support I was told that would quickly fade once I hit 12 weeks…maybe 14 if I wasn’t lucky. I threw up daily until 17 weeks and that was with the aid of prescription anti-nausea meds which I really didn’t want to have to do. Once that finally subsided I started having severe round ligament pain and then started experiencing just an extreme amount of pressure pretty much all the time on the whole front side of my body in addition to shortness of breath which made having just a simple phone conversation challenging. I’ve had a few good days but they have been few and far between.
Just about the time I hit 36/37 weeks I FINALLY started to feel better. Had some days without extreme pressure or nausea and thought, ok I’ve got this. Then bam, got a cold that turned into bronchitis as it often does for me, coughed, and fractured a rib. So here I sit just 2 weeks before my due date with an injury that typically takes 6 weeks to heal and yet another trip logged to the ER which required an x-ray and pain meds (not part of my plan for this baby).
So I am here to say this….it’s ok for pregnancy not to be some beautiful, magical experience because it’s not for everyone. I didn’t feel like I had a safe space to say that without it coming off as an ungrateful complaining you know what. I have shared with my husband that I struggled with depression during most of my first and second trimesters, again something I didn’t share with anyone else, not because I was ashamed but because there was no safe space for that. What I needed more than anything was more people in my corner telling me it was totally ok to feel like shit and not be happy about it but that doesn’t seem to exist in the world for expectant mothers. But it should. I am here to tell you that if you have had or are currently having a less-than-stellar pregnancy that is ok. It doesn’t make you a bad person for hating being pregnant, there is no shame in feeling like crap and telling the people around you that. It’s ok if your pregnancy didn’t look like everyone else.
We have done such a great job as a society and community of women over the last few years of creating a safe space where it is no longer taboo to talk about infertility, traumatic birth/delivery experiences, postpartum depression, or the struggles of motherhood yet we are still missing this piece and I can imagine I am not the only one that would have benefited from being able to articulate out loud how I was feeling without judgment.
So with that I say, we can do better. Pregnancy is weird. It’s so incredibly different for each person just like every other aspect of life and we need a space to honor that for every mother.