My Pregnancy: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Just two cycles after our miscarriage, I had another positive test.  As usual, I tested very early (about 6 days prior to my expected period).  Ivan was out at a soccer game while I was home staring hard at a second pink line that was so faint I wondered if I was imagining it.  But after about half an hour of staring, I was pretty sure that it was real.  I bounced around with adrenalin for a while, and then decided to keep myself distracted until Ivan returned by applying for every midwifery waitlist in the city (since midwife care only recently became covered in Alberta and the demand far exceeds the availability).  I finally had my opportunity to share the news with Ivan in an exciting way so I filled our room with whatever baby items we had collected over the years (yup, we’ve been buying baby books and clothes since before we got married, in eager anticipation) and put some signs through the house congratulating him on finally becoming a dad.

The emotional high of being pregnant again was countered by the fear of a repeat miscarriage, and by the physical discomforts that are common in the first trimester.  I felt like I was immersed in a haze of low grade nausea and sleepiness for those three months.  I learned that ‘morning sickness’ is a mythical term invented by a man who didn’t realize that pregnant women frequently have nausea and/or vomiting at any time of the day.  For me, it was mild enough that I managed not to throw up at work but was not so lucky at home.  I tried to remind myself about how I used to long for nausea just to have a sign of pregnancy…but it didn’t stop me from complaining!

Second trimester was far better.  Many say that this is the best part of pregnancy since you’re usually past the nauseous stage and since your baby bump is big enough to ‘show’ but not so big that it interferes with daily life.  I felt so much better that I re-arranged our summer roadtrip at the last minute to turn it into a camping trip, since I suddenly realized that it would be my last chance to have an outdoor adventure alone with Ivan (mind you, we fully plan on taking our kiddies on roadtrips too…but I imagine camping will feel a bit different when it involves a diaper bag).  Aside from having a sore back from tent sleeping and ‘needing’ a daily dose of ice cream, my pregnancy didn’t seem to affect our trip much.  So after an amazing week on the East Coast, we headed to Ontario to finish our vacation with a bang by announcing our news in person to our extended family and friends.  I tried to make it clever by telling them: ‘we need to change our reservations to 3, please!’  They were over the moon with joy for us, and we were happy to take them there.  My only difficulty with pregnancy during that time was the judgmental looks and/or words I got whenever I wanted to do something that society has brainwashed us to think pregnant women are incapable of.  For example: eating spicy food (really? – do we think women in India stop eating spicy food for 9 months?), carrying my nephew (isn’t that what pregnant moms with toddlers do everyday?), or enjoying a waterpark (okay – I realize this one is a bit harder to argue.  But I was only 14 weeks, barely showing, and although the waterslide signs warned that they weren’t meant for pregnant women, my interpretation is that they meant ‘very pregnant’ women).

If second trimester is the peak, then third trimester is certainly the fall from grace, so to speak.  I didn’t really struggle with body image issues during pregnancy since a) I’ve been there and done that, b) I’ve always looked forward to pregnancy as being a guilt-free opportunity to indulge in more junk food than usual, and c) I’d like to think that, for the most part, I just gained a healthy amount of weight in my belly and not too much anywhere else (except for the multiple chins that arrived in the last few weeks).  I was lucky to have a close friend, Liza, just one trimester behind me (who is about to pop any day now – yay!), so we each had a buddy to try and keep each other somewhat active.  We did pre-natal yoga together each week and alternated aquafit classes with ‘swimming’ double dates (by swimming, I mean Liza and I did laps while Dave and Ivan took turns cannon balling from a swinging rope).  I’d like to think that all of this activity helped prevent any edema/swelling.  However, I learned that no matter how hard you try, you still will very likely reach a ‘breaking point’ when you just feel done with being pregnant - mine was somewhere around 38 weeks.  By this point, I was tired, achy, cranky, and even hot, despite it being -30 outside (as my co-worker will attest to, since I threatened to kill him when he turned the heater on in our office).  I even had a night leg cramp that was so intense it caused tendinitis in my ankle that left me limping and in need of physiotherapy!  That’s when I finally stopped working, which was shocking to my younger male cousins who thought that maternity leave started as soon as you became pregnant (probably because if men had babies that’s when they would give up).  Since baby ended up arriving right on time, that gave me 2 weeks off to kick back, read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, cook and freeze some meals, and reflect on how my life was about to change forever.