So, there are things about pregnancy that I was dreading, and I’m pretty sure that there are different things about pregnancy that different people dread. Like sitting in childbirth class (which is worthless by the way – these classes are geared for people who only have female friends and mothers who will NOT tell it like it is) and one woman said her only concern about pregnancy was that she didn’t want hemorroids. I so just wanted to tell her, “Girlfriend, it ain’t no thing.”
This whole experiment has been different from what I expected it to be. For one, I assumed I would be HUGE, and I’m not. I mean, I’m clearly pregnant, but I look down at my stomach and I’m not sure how an entire baby fits in there.
I have this weight gain chart that I made on the computer – I determined early into my pregnancy that there was NO REASON for me to gain 30 pounds, I started out over my ideal weight with a BMI that the people at the gym gasped in dismay about (while they looked at skinny Scout and loooooved him), so I clearly decided there was no need to gain more than 18 pounds. Oh YES, friends. That’s what I have clearly plotted out on my graph, a nice blue line under the heading of “Desired Weight Gain”. I sat comfortably below that blue line until week 19. And then I jumped over it. Never to return. And after a couple of weeks of being over the line I just didn’t care anymore. Thing one that I learned to shrug off. (Since we are all friends I WILL tell you that this coincided with the need to go buy some pretty powerful, but still ineffective, fiber pills.)
And hey, I was still below the RED line of “Danger, One Fatass Coming Up”, so I felt good. Until Week 33 when I passed up the red line. And by that time I was so fed up with several other things that I decided that in a world where I couldn’t drink, smoke, go to the gym, have sex (another whole topic), walk comfortably, go shopping for clothes that were on sale and looked nice, get my hair colored (not that I usually do – but since I can’t, I of course REALLY want to), shave all the parts of my body I’d like to shave or sleep through the night – I decided I had one thing going for me. Food. I love food. Food clearly loves me. So let’s get together. And together we got. Whatever I wanted. Thing two I learned to shrug off.
Just for fun I have my idealistic weight LOSS table and graph already made up. I figure if I find the weight gain unrealistic and really funny, that I clearly need to do the same with the weight loss.
Now the boobs. OMG. Seriously. No one needs boobs like these. No one. These aren’t even stripper boobs b/c no one would pay to see these things – They have the stripper size, but the have the perkiness of a grandma – and not a hip young grandma, I mean a well worn, well loved, pin curl puffy, perma purse carrying, grandma. The sheer size of these girls is the first thing that sent me in to pregnant tantrum land.
Now, I know full well that I’ve been “blessed” with an “easy” pregnancy. I know that the aches and pains (and yeah, I’ll refer to them as pains now) that I have are cake compared to what some people have to deal with. But damn. I used to go days and weeks without feeling the sensation of pain, and now I feel it at least hourly. And that sucks. And that merited a pregnant tantrum all it’s own. And I’m here to tell you I felt so much better after that yell and scream and cry.
So, I’ve learned to shrug off 30+ pound weight gain, my face has finally lost it’s non pregnant girl shape – meaning my new look is now round. I seem to wake up from naps with the most hysterically funny horrible bed head and swollen sleep face (I’m bringing sexy back), hemmoroids are no sweat, the boobs I typically just eyeroll because they are so ridiculous.
The next thing on my worry list of “please don’t let this happen to me” was the stomach stretch marks. Now I knew I just had to be destined to get them – I still have a whole patch of them on my thighs, boobs and calves from puberty, there was just no way that I was going to have a baby and not get them. But occasionally someone would give me hope and I’d think maybe I’d be okay. Then one showed up. I thought it was a vein for about a week, when I realized what it was, I was very peaceful with it, treated it like a little tattoo commemorating my pregnancy. Well, clearly I was too welcoming, because in a matter of THREE days, right at week 36 my stomach busted out into so many stretch marks I can’t even begin to count them. And my initial cute friendly one is now four inches long and a half inch wide. And you know what? I don’t give a flying fuck. And I don’t mean in a “oh, these are my badge of womanhood/motherhood” sort of bullshit, I just mean, that by this time in this pregnancy that it’s like “well of COURSE this has happened to me too.” Just a sense of resignation to the fact that my body is not in Kansas anymore and ….. it just didn’t phase me as much as I thought it would. It’s like the old John Black from Days of Our Lives quote – “The longer this goes on …. the longer this goes on.”
So now I have two bodily concerns – blowing out my wahoo in delivery, and having really ugly new babymama photos taken. Let’s see how those two concerns pan out shall we?