Stop Reading!

Don’t listen to me or anyone else who tells you what to do or how to feel about pregnancy. Pregnancy is a universally unique experience; billions of us have gone through it for millions of years each in our own way. Just as there is no book or no statistic that will make any of us good mothers there is no right way to handle this invading body snatcher or miracle of life – depending on your perspective. We just have to get through the nine months or forty weeks or two hundred and eight days or there about as best we can.

The goal of the whole exercise is to welcome a little creature into the world thus fulfilling our biological imperative and garnering a bit of immortality. I feel a need to remind myself of this as I stare at a body which I can only see parts of and within which my former comfort is merely a memory. There are nights when no position is comfortable and sleep seems like yet another forfeited dream of youth. On these nights I look at the mountain that used to be my stomach and then at my husband and think “demon seed”. Sometimes, pregnancy just sucks. However, in the morning after one of those awful nights there exists a flutter of life in the pit of my being that used to only forewarn of doom and I am sustained for another day of gestation.

If we are to make it through this we must find some joy and laughter in the experience – even when leaning over a toilet or bleary-eyed from an ornery baby. I hope that the perspective I share on this blog about my meandering road to motherhood has helped you to find the lighter side of these often long nine months. There is humor in this even while we run to the bathroom looking for answers in the oodles of platitudes hurled at us as well-intentioned advise. This pregnancy thing keeps the species on the planet so it can’t be all that bad. Try to find joy in the mess of it, this is good practice for the joyful and messy roller coaster of parenthood.