My Pregnancy Journey: The First Trimester
/Hello everyone! Who would like to hear about My Pregnancy Journey*?
No, I didn’t think so, but here we are anyway. Shut up, it’s educational.
update on my parenting journey: we’ve reached the stage where when you get poo on your hand you no longer go “jesus christ that’s revolting,” you just go “ah yes, poo.”
please note this only applies if it is the baby’s poo. i don’t want your poo on me. what is wrong with you.
just to clarify, i don’t want the baby’s poo on me either, but YOU MIGHT AS WELL TRY TO STOP THE SUN FROM RISING.
The most polite thing I have to say about pregnancy is that it is interesting if you haven’t done it before.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very fortunate to have the Milkmeister, it’s just lucky that she is such a high-quality baby because otherwise why on earth would you bother. You might as well sit in a hole for 9 months counting your fingers (and you’d probably have a better time).
*The phrase “pregnancy journey” gets chucked around a lot but I feel like “pregnancy odyssey” is more apt. It is fraught with weird dangers, feels like it takes 10 years, there’s a whole bunch of things you can’t eat, and you have to plug your ears with beeswax on the regular.
One of those things was not true.
Good news, though: you don’t have to cling onto the underside of a sheep and ride (?) far away from it all, although at times that doesn’t seem like such a bad option.
some cheeky Homeric references there for you intellectual folk. See, not your ordinary mommy blog!
I don’t want to take away from the resolutely jolly timbre of this blog but oh boy, pregnancy was physically tough and mentally gruelling and above all else, long.
If you’re thinking about having a Milkmeister of your own, don’t let me put you off; it is worth it! Provided you get a good Milkmeister. But you may not think that at the time.
Despite having a supportive partner and supportive workplace and supportive family and friends and supportive underwear it felt like a very lonely endeavour. Also an irritating one; I was constantly functioning at 30-70% of my normal human capacity, and as soon as I adapted to one Pregnancy Effect another one came along and bungled up my week.
It was also tricky because the generally accepted idea is that pregnancy is a magical time, where your maternal glow and excitement at the prospect of new life are only slightly marred by a light dab of morning sickness - so when someone says “How are you finding pregnancy?” and you cheerfully* say “Terrible! I wouldn’t wish it on a dog” they look at you as if you have just said that you think Hitler might have been onto something.
I’VE WRITTEN AND DELETED SO MANY Heinously OFFENSIVE CAPTIONS FOR THIS PHOTO. JUST IMAGINE THEY’RE SAYING SOMETHING HITLERY.
ALSO I SEE THAT THE MAN IS HOLDING THE PREGNANT BELLY, but WHAT IS THE LADY HOLDING?
*I decided early on in pregnancy that I would be cheerful throughout, and this was a good decision. Pregnancy sucks, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so you might as well approach it with a sense of Resilient Good Humour rather than constantly whinging about your nausea, fatigue, joints, diet, insomnia, gas, constipation, anxiety, pain, or weird amount of boogers. (Yes! It’s a thing. Google pregnancy rhinitis if you don’t believe me.)
Thus ends the gritty realism section of My Pregnancy Journey.
LET’S RECOVER FROM THAT DEPRESSING BIT WITH THIS PICTURE I FOUND WHEN I SEARCHED ’CYCLOPS’ IN THE STOCK IMAGE LIBRARY.
Fortunately, there were some things I liked about being pregnant!
Here are all three of them.
You have an excuse to avoid events you did not want to go to in the first place. Oh no, so pregnant, so tired, couldn’t possibly come to your child’s kindergarten graduation.
Maternity clothing is incredibly comfortable. Did you know maternity jeans look like regular jeans, but where there would normally be a tight waistband there is just a big old stretchy band of fabric? Fantastic news for a Rubenesque person such as I.
It’s nice when you can feel the baby moving; it makes you feel more like a team and less like a hippo that is craving smoked salmon*.
*great idea for a children’s book.
So - on to the journey. Today we will be learning about the first trimester!
For those not in the trimestery know, pregnancy is split into three bits, called trimesters. The ‘tri’ is for ‘three’ and the ‘mester’ is for something else.
The first trimester is exciting but stressful, the third trimester is exciting but uncomfortable, and the second trimester is mercifully boring.
The Four Horsemen of the First Trimester are morning sickness, secrecy, Google and farts.
aLSO A DEEP YEARNING FOR SMOKED SALMON. YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IT ANY MORE FOR REASONS I CAN NO LONGER RECALL
1. Morning Sickness
In the movies, morning sickness is textbook pregnancy shorthand; the winsome barrister dashes out of a deposition to throw up in a wastebasket and bam! plot point.
BAM! ‘WINSOME BARRISTER’ DID NOT BRING UP A WHOLE LOT OF STOCK IMAGES. ALSO I DON’T KNOW WHAT A DEPOSITION IS BUT I ASSUME ONE CAN RUSH OUT OF IT.
I didn’t have that kind of morning sickness. I only threw up twice; once after drinking my morning cup of black coffee, and once the following day after stubbornly refusing to accept that I couldn’t drink my morning cup of black coffee.
TECHNICALLY I COULD DRINK IT, IT JUST UNDRUNK ITSELF ALMOST IMMEDIATELY.
ALSO THIS PICTURE IS VERY ‘HOMeWARES CATALOGUE’ is'n’t it. this month only, 30% off vomiting women!
My morning sickness was more like when you have a Large Night Out and wake up chronically hungover; not the ‘mild headache and want a cheeseburger’ kind of hungover, the spirit-crushing kind where you don’t know if you’ll ever feel like a normal person again, and then some optimistic soul suggests going for brunch and you aren’t sure whether food will make you feel better or make you throw up.
My morning sickness was like that, for most of the day, for about 8 weeks.
BUT WITHOUT THE CRIPPLING ANXIETY ABOUT CHECKING YOUR BANK BALANCE AND SENT MESSAGES.
As a result, the first few weeks of the Milkmeister’s development were fuelled almost exclusively by cheese, crackers, canned tuna, and Marmite scrolls from the cafe across from work.
I ate so many Marmite scrolls that one colleague guessed I was pregnant, based on scroll consumption alone. I ate so many Marmite scrolls that the people at the cafe started reaching for one before I ordered. I ate so many Marmite scrolls that my colleagues nicknamed the pending Milkmeister ‘Sanitaria’, after the company that makes Marmite.
i ate so many Marmite scrolls that my colleagues bought the Milkmeister this amazing onesie.
2. Google
The first thing you find out about being pregnant is that you know absolutely fuck all about being pregnant. The second thing you find out is how much there is to find out.
As a result, the first trimester is mainly spent Googling what you can and can’t do. Everyone knows about not drinking or smoking or eating sushi and soft cheese, but did you also know that…
You can’t take any painkillers. This really comes into play later on in the pregnancy, when you’re carting around 5kg of Baby And Its House.
You can’t have any pre-prepared salads, cured meats, deli meats, shellfish, smoked salmon, ‘raw juices’ (don’t think I had a lot of those anyway given that I don’t really know what they are), salad dressings that have been open for more than 2-3 days, cream cheese or sour cream or milk that has been open for more than 2-3 days, steak that is anything under well-done, tonic water which you’d really think would be pretty inoffensive, sauces/dressings made at restaurants, or anything involving a non-hard egg.
WHY DIDN’T I JUST SAY SOFT EGG? ALSO, THE ONLY THING IN THIS PHOTO THAT YOU CAN EAT IS THE BUN.
QUICK pregnancy lesson: you only have a no-hollandaise, no smoked salmon, hard-poached Eggs Benedict once. Drier than a camel’s fanny
you probably can’t eat one of those either
And you can only have two cups of coffee per day, and you can’t go in a hot pool or a hot bath because you will poach the baby.
Also, you can’t sleep on your back after a certain point, because it can cut off blood supply for you and the baby. This one is so important that my midwife’s waiting room had Government-issued posters that said “Sleep on your side when baby’s inside!” and if that isn’t the sort of lazy-ass rhyme a Government department comes up with then I don’t know what is.
sleep on your side when your womb’s occupied!
i had another idea but it was about sleeping on your front and it wasn’t very polite
3. Secrecy
The general advice is to not tell anybody that you’re pregnant before you reach 12 weeks*, so there is an extended period of time (12 weeks) where you’re busy not eating deli meats but you can’t tell anybody about it.
I would say this is the longest 12 weeks of your life, but then I would be neglecting the boring-ass second trimester. I managed to not tell anybody, except my sister and my clairvoyant client who said “ah! you have good news but you can’t tell me yet!” and that technically isn’t my fault because I didn’t tell her, some spirit or other did.
*you probably didn’t know (I didn’t) that around 20% of pregnancies miscarry, and the vast majority of these are before 12 weeks. I had a miscarriage before I had the Milkmeister, who clung stubbornly to the walls of my uterus like a tiny limpet. I’m only including this info because I don’t think people know how common miscarriages are, and it’s something we should all feel a bit more comfortable talking about.
…apart from perhaps my clairvoyant client, who said “I had a dream you were PREGNANT” the day after the miscarriage, and if you’ve been in a more awkward social situation I would love to hear about it.
LET’S RECOVER FROM THAT DEPRESSING BIT WITH THIS PICTURE I FOUND WHEN I SEARCHED ’toilet bowl’ IN THE STOCK IMAGE LIBRARY.
I did the ‘Secrecy’ part on hard mode by going into the pregnancy as a well-established booze and smoked salmon enjoyer.
What I should’ve done is gradually but loudly reduce my public alcohol and smoked salmon consumption beforehand under the guise of some wanky health kick, because I had to convince everybody in my life that I was suddenly doing a stone-cold detox and reader, they did not buy it.
I had one 0% beer at a staff do and a colleague roared “YOU’RE PREGNANT” across the table. God damn it Beccy.
4. Farts
For some reason, all of the pregnancy manuals really go light on the fart chat. This is odd given that when you’re pregnant you will turn into an absolute fart machine. Fun!
ON THE PLUS SIDE, YOU CAN INSTALL ONE OF THESE NEAR YOUR BUTT AND SAVE A HEAP ON YOUR POWER BILL.
This is because when you’re pregnant you produce more progesterone, which thickens the lining of your uterus so your limpetty Milkmeister can better cling on. Progesterone also stops you ovulating so your Milkmeister doesn’t pop out half-done, or so you don’t get an accidental second Milkmeister who is younger than the first, or for some other reason. I don’t know, I didn’t read the whole article.
Progesterone also loosens your muscles, including the muscles of your digestive innards, which slows down your digestion, which increases your fart production.
Good for you!
THE STOCK IMAGE LIBRARY IS REALLY GIVING IT TODAY.
If you happen to have a fart fetish, this is your time to shine. If you’re like the rest of us, be prepared to hotbox your car, cubicle and anywhere else you may venture.
That’s all for now! Tune in next time for Trimester Two: Constipation Boogaloo.