To start, a disclaimer: I am not currently pregnant. I’m writing this post for a dear friend, who asked me to show her the lovely parts of pregnancy and childbirth, instead of just the hard parts, as they prepare to grow their family. I also want to be clear that pregnancy is 9 months of internal contradictions. I have loved being pregnant and I have hated it. I have felt immense certainty, and crushing ambivalence. I have savored it and I have wished it could be over already. I have felt strong and empowered and uncomfortable and weak. I have had bone-deep anxiety, trimester-long depression, and also felt stronger joy and contentment than I have felt at any other point in life. Also, if you’re currently going through infertility or pregnancy loss, this is probably a post to skip.
But right now, my friend needs the lovely stuff. The poignant stuff. So that’s what this post is.
Do you know that feeling in springtime when the flowers have all just burst from their buds, and every rain brings a sense of freshness and renewal, and it’s all so vividly green that your eyes could just look and look at the same tree, for hours? It’s a sense of heightened awareness of the world around you–as if you are new again in it–but that its newness, and your newness, will not last.
That’s a little bit what being pregnant is like. Especially the early days, when so much of it is left up to your imagination.
The imagining starts even before the pregnancy–it begins as soon as you’re trying for a baby. I remember one month, just around the time that I was ovulating, stepping outside into the velvety Georgia-January night and gazing up at the full moon, wondering what the next full moon would bring. Would I have my period at the new moon, or a positive pregnancy test? In nine full moons, would I be as round as one?
Trying for a baby connects you to the future in a different way than usual. Before the sperm has even had a chance to meet the egg, you’re already thinking nine months out, weighing whether it’d be a good time: if the baby comes in August they’ll be so young for their grade; a Christmas baby, imagine that!; spring would be nice–all our other birthdays are in the fall.
Then, the two-week wait–those maddening two weeks when it is two early to take a pregnancy test, too soon to know. My imagination always flourishes during those two weeks. My attention draws inward, to the six inch span above my pubic bone. I imagine the egg rolling down the fallopian tubes, the sperm meeting it. The blastocyst, burrowing into the uterine lining, dividing rapidly. I imagine who that tiny life force could grow to be, what they could look like, how it would feel to meet and to love them.
I am always so utterly tuned into my body at this point, that for each of my pregnancies, I have known with deep certainty that I’m pregnant before I’ve taken the pregnancy test. With L, it was a metallic taste in my mouth, runny nose, and shortness of breath when I was on runs. With H, I noticed a new mole right below my eye, and felt instantly certain–not to mention the early waves of nausea I experienced. With W, another new mole, this time on my foot, and a sense of smell so strong that I could barely handle walking down the street on trash day. And with all three of them: an insistent prickling sensation in my womb (that was notably absent during my two pregnancies that ended in miscarriage).
Those symptoms don’t sound particularly pleasant, but let me be clear: I urged each one on mentally, worried when my symptoms stopped, and held my breath as I listened so closely to my body that I could feel my pulse in my wrists.
By the time I took a test for each pregnancy I was always fairly certain that I’d be seeing two lines, even though each time it was usually many days before my period was due. Even still–the joy and shock and instant love I felt each time was swifter and stronger than anything I’d ever imagined.
It’s hard to describe how your gravity shifts when you find out that you have a new life within you. Suddenly, your life isn’t oriented around yourself–it is oriented around your baby. In those early, mysterious days, before I’ve told the wider world, I always picture my baby as a tiny, blinking light–as warm and bright as the sun.
I’ll find myself resting my hand above my pubic bone, sending awe-struck thoughts to the tiny life growing there. Things like keep growing and I love you so much and who will you be?
With each pregnancy, I have filled my pockets with tiny things from nature–tiny flower petals and pebbles and pinecones and flower buds and acorns–that are the same size as the baby on any given day and week of pregnancy. I’ve held them in my palm, and gazed, astounded, at how miniature they are in the vast folds of my hand.
Each new stage brings deeper love–the first glimpse of their beating heart and wiggly little body on the ultrasound. Learning their sex. Choosing a name.
And–feeling the baby move. I remember with L, I’d been feeling tiny bubbles and tickles for some time, but it wasn’t until an ultrasound where I felt the baby move and then watched a leg kick out on the screen that I realized it was what I’d been feeling all along.
I also remember desperately waiting for a bump to appear–gazing at my belly in the mirror each day, twisting from side to side in different lights, trying to assess whether I could discern a bump. When I first developed a bump with L, it was just a small, soft-ball sized lump that peeked out from above my pelvic bone. I remember poking at it while laying in bed one morning, telling Jordan that I thought it was the baby, and Jordan insisting that he thought it was a poop (now that I’ve been through it a few times, I can attest: it was the baby!).
When my belly finally rounded out, I loved it desperately, even while I felt torn away (literally) from the strong, intact core that I’d been lucky to have all my life.
Early on in pregnancy, I even find myself enjoying the dietary restrictions. Because I mentally know that it’s for a temporary period, I savor the specialness of avoiding alcohol and soft cheese and raw fish. It has all the hope of getting on a new health kick, except that it’s healthier and more joyful, and you can’t stop the kick until 9 months later, when the baby comes out. (I will admit that it becomes much less fun at the end of pregnancy, when you’ve been doing it for over half a year, and you’re ready to stop worrying about what you eat when, and whether it’s safe).
Even my food aversions and cravings I’ve found to be enjoyable, in an odd way–how funny that I suddenly can’t be in the room while meat is cooked! And what an adventure that I’ve got to get through a bridal shower where fish is being served when just the smell makes me gag. And how delightfully bizarre that I suddenly can’t stop chugging buttermilk.
The middle of pregnancy is lovely. You have a cute belly, your energy has returned after the first trimester fatigue, and you can feel baby kicks. You’re far enough along that you can really start to imagine what it might be like to hold that baby in your arms. It was at this stage that I started to sit in our secondhand rocking chair, with L, imagining the warm, squirmy little baby I might rock to sleep there.
I’d had trouble being fully hopeful about the fact that we might end up with a baby after my first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. But I never felt more hopeful, or sharper longing, than when I sat in that rocking chair, one hand on my belly, imagining cradling my little baby.
Even the end–which is the least comfortable, thanks to a belly that feels like a bowling ball–is suffused with that special glow, especially with your first pregnancy. There’s the question of when the baby will come, that sense like you and your partner are hurtling off a cliff into the complete unknown. I remember driving to the grocery store late in the third trimester and thinking that it might be me and Jordan’s last time ever going with just the two of us (I think I was probably right, but I hadn’t discovered the joys of grocery shopping with cute kids to pretend the cart is a garbage truck and help toss groceries in).
So many women dread birth–and I remember feeling terrified of it before I got pregnant. But nature is wise, in its way. And by the time I get to the end with each pregnancy, I’m so incredibly ready to give birth that I feel only eager for the experience–and always urge on early contractions like they’re horses in a race that I’ve bet on.
And then, once labor is done, and you’re looking at that tiny, miraculous little human, with their miniature nose and miniature eyelashes and beautiful rounded cheeks. There aren’t words to describe how life alteringly wonderful those first moments are. How incredibly special.
Feathery Thoughts 