Pregnancy

Pregnancy is fuck-all-shit.
No apologies for the swear words.

The images the media feeds to you of this glowing, beautiful woman, wearing a cornflower blue tent looking at a green field and smiling to herself is plain stupid.

Pregnancy is all about throwing up, or feeeling like throwing up the whole bloody day ( who coined the term 'morning' sickness, must be a man). None of the dried ginger or dry biscuit before getting up nonsense worked for me. Finally a friend got me dried, salted gooseberries and i swear i got through about 100 packets of that during the nine months- the only thing that vaguely kept me sane. On the down side, I can not smell, or taste gooseberries not without thinking of my pregnancy. Oh, and you know what, morning sickness is not just limited to the first trimester, it typically goes on till month 4 or 5 and resurfaces in the last tri.
Brilliant!


Smell- oh that reminds me. You cannot bear to smell anything- i remember i used to wrap a towel around my nose and face to open the refrigerator and once i woudl open the door i would run as far as i could and study the fridge from a distance to decide what i wanted, then would stop breathing and run towards the fridge to grab what i wanted ad close the stupid door as soon as possible. Add a huge belly and the running around sounds like  a lot of fun, does it not?

And you are changing shape, from glam you are labelled cute (how i hate hate hate that word now) and you know you look like a whale. infact i had started signing off emails with a little whale at the bottom. And this is when my doctor cousin told me i was pumpkin on a stick shape- no extra fat except the belly, i shudder to think how i would have dealt with things had i put on a lot more.

Oh and you need to pee, all the time (insert swear word, oz really, this post deserves a lot of swear words). You will ear mark the toilets when you plan a trip to the super market.

And then towards the end, the whole process of turning sides will be a mammoth exercise ( you are of course, not sleeping much anyway). I cannot even begin to describe how terribly difficlut it becomes to do this simple thing. i used to brace myself and then turn slowly and most painfully, groaning out of sheer discomfort.

Emotionally your hormones are all over the place and that is fuck-all in absolutely glorious ways.

And when you think about how this will all end, panic sets it, because, my darling, you will give birth. So the options you have are 1) normal birth, 2) c sec, 3) 100 hours of labour and then emergency c sec. So basicaly 1)horrible 2)horrible and guess what 3)horrible.

And this is an absolutely normal pregnancy.

And this is when i am REALLY TRULY leaving out the truly gross because this is not the place to talk about it all.
So why am i saying all this here.

The reason is that i am tired of hearing people (men) say that almost every woman goes through pregnancy, it cannot really be that tough. True, for some women it is a breeze but for most women who will be honest with you, it is a very tough time of their lives ( please be kind to them, and if possible ask after them).
Because you know what: Women don't do this pregnancy shit because it is easy, they do it and do it happily,  in spite of how bloody difficult it is.

Respect it!