- Being expected to love being pregnant.
- Being expected to think every single thing made for a baby is cuuuuuute.
- Swollen feet that feel bruised because I have to wear shoes to work.
- This muscle in my upper abdomen that never quite stops aching.
- The matching muscle in my back that's never totally happy either.
- Having so much baby inside that my stomach is squished and I can't eat much.
- People who would rather talk about the baby than anything else.
- People who think I'm a bad mother or something when I want to talk about something other than the baby.
- Hemorrhoids.
- Awkward sex.
- All the piles of baby stuff squatting in my living room because I haven't gotten around to cleaning out enough room in the Play Room to put the baby stuff in there.
- Lack of energy.
- Lack of desire, motivation, and sometimes ability to write.
- Needing to sleep more and then feeling guilty about it because I have other stuff to do.
- Knowing that once the baby arrives, I'll be even more tired for a while.
- People who already act like the baby is more interesting than I am. I'm still a person too!
- The fact that the words "I'm still a person too!" bring tears to my eyes.
...revealing my thoughts about movies, writing, and life to the audience...
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Things I Hate About Being Pregnant
6 comments:
Agree or disagree? That is the question...
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I personally focus on the joys of the baby because I think the realities are so horribly depressing that every mother should be desperately seeking to avoid thinking about them -- and it's too late to not be pregnant, so I try to help. This is the 'fragile butterfly' theory of human psychology that keeps my parents from ever even joking about the word 'divorce,' as if disaster were so likely that even the suggestion of it will make it come true.
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned on k.com a while ago, I would rather face things realistically, expecting a newborn baby to be a lot of work and full of poop, and then find out that there are all sorts of great rewards and that I enjoy being a mother, rather than going in all rose-colored-glasses and expecting everything to be wonderful and adorable and then finding out that it ain't necessarily so.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, I guess I just get really sick of people going, "Oh, being pregnant is so wonderful! I loved being pregnant! Enjoy it while you can!" when I forget that I'm pregnant half the time unless something reminds me, and the other half of the time I'm uncomfortable and irritated because my feet and ankles are stiff or the baby has its head shoved up under my rib cage or I'm dead tired and can't do stuff. Then being told this should be wonderful just makes me feel like a big, fat, bloated whale of a failure.
I've never been much of a fragile butterfly, I guess. I'd rather say, "Hey, some stuff about this sucks, but I'm doing it anyway, so there!" than pretend that everything is perfect.
And I really think Cowboy is right, that a lot of post-partum anxiety and depression might be partly due to women being told over and over how much they'll love being a mother and how wonderful babies are, and then they get handed this bag of poop that cries almost all the time, and they feel like, "What am I doing wrong? Why isn't this wonderful? It must be my fault! I'm a bad mother!" Anyway, that makes sense to me.
Actually, this is all probably a reaction to my parents, who constantly told me, "Marriage is hard work." And so I went into marriage expecting it to be hard work, and instead it's been loads of fun and doesn't seem like work at all. So I guess I'm approaching motherhood the same way, expecting it to be hard work, and hoping that maybe it won't turn out to be so tough after all.
First of all, I remember feeling a lot of the same things that you are feeling right now when I was carrying Drew. And the advice/comments, (unsolicited), from EVERYONE made me see red. I was not a nice pregnant woman. I was, quite simply, a bitch. Here was this child inside me, I had no clue what I was gonna do when he got here, didn't know if I could even take care of myself, much less a squirming, squalling bundle of poop in a onesie. To put it plain, I was scared to death.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for all the crap that people kept offering, advice wise, my mother put it all into perspective for me. There are no two pregnancies that are the same. Everyone feels different, reacts differently. I chose to make everyone around me miserable, because I found that the most effective way to shut them up when they started offering 'sage advice' about my child. I didn't wanna hear it. I felt like I disappeared when people started about the baby. And to this day, I HATE the word cute. Hey people, there ARE other adjectives out there, use them.
I won't tell you that it's easy to take care of a child. It's not. And I won't tell you how wonderful it is to be pregnant. It wasn't. Don't get me wrong, when they handed Drew to me, I was estactic! Scared, but thrilled. While I was carrying him, I was crabby, hot, uncomfortable, (how they manage to wrap those tiny little toes around a rib, I'll never know!) and I wanted people to just go away and leave me alone. One lady I worked with was constantly getting on me about my eating habits. If I wasn't hungry, I didn't eat a side of beef. I musta done something right, Drew weighed 9 lbs, 10 oz when he got here. LOL
So just listen to yourself. Let the others yammer on til they're blue in the face. It's your body, it's your child. And that guilty feeling? It'll go away. Trust me. Gumdrop is gonna be so lucky to have such a cool Mama. And a smart one, too.
My best wishes to you, Cowboy, and Gumdrop.
Maggie
Thanks so much, Maggie! It's great to know I'm not the only non-overly-bouncy pregnant woman. I mean, for the most part I've been my usual cheery self. But there are just times that I am NOT, and people seem to get all weirded out when Hamlette is being less-than-boingy.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for all the crap that people kept offering, advice wise, my mother put it all into perspective for me. There are no two pregnancies that are the same.
Thank you. That's perfect. Why can't more people understand things that way? You have a cool mom.
Thanks for the pepper-upper, Mags. I've actually been much less crabby about all this again, now that I'm fairly firmly back on my night schedule and getting back into the swing of my life. But there are still times, like this morning when I got home from work and my feet throbbed and ached for two hours, that I just get all Grrrr about it again.
Hey Rach!
ReplyDeleteI think nowadays motherhood/pregnancy is looked at like this almost goddess like state! Look at the commercials! I'm sure that's not true and people shouldn't expect for you to be happy all the time. *hugs* Do you get tired of people asking when is the baby coming? I had a friend who got sick of it..lol.
I think nowadays motherhood/pregnancy is looked at like this almost goddess like state!
ReplyDeleteYeah, in some ways it seems to be. I have a couple co-workers who think I now need to have everything done for me. I'm like, "Dude, I'm pregnant, not paralyzed!"
Do you get tired of people asking when is the baby coming?
Sometimes. Usually it makes me laugh though, because I don't look nearly as far along as I am, particularly in my work clothes. So people will say things like, "You're what, six months along now? Seven?" and I'll say, "Nope, eight. Four weeks to go." And then I get to watch their eyes bug out, and if they're a woman who had a baby and got very large with it, she'll start to tell me how much she envies me because by the time she was eight months along she was roughly the size of a water buffalo, etc.
One of my coworkers actually found out just last week that I'm pregnant. I had to go help him in Hardware, and I mentioned that it was dumb that they sent ME there because I can't lift anything heavy, and he looked at me really funny and said, "Wait -- are you pregnant?!" He just thought I'd been gaining weight!