It feels so surprising to say this but I'm already over halfway through my pregnancy! (Officially 21 weeks and 1 day but who's counting?). It's going by so slow and so fast all at the same time. I remember being 8 weeks pregnant, before anyone but Erik and I knew about the cricket in my belly and thinking with crinkled brow...thirrrty twooo more weeks to go… how do women do this?
I won't lie, those first couple months were hard for me. There were millions of thoughts going through my mind about what this pregnancy meant for us and I felt overwhelmed with worry. I worried about everything. I worried about how wild and imperfect and impulsive and flawed I am. How can I have a baby?! I worried if our baby would be healthy and if it was something I could cause or prevent with the things I do or eat? I worried about losing my identity and my freedom. I worried about the world we live in. I worried about it not just being Erik and I anymore. I worried about each symptom I felt. I spent hours and hours devouring information on pregnancy. I think with the amount of time I spent studying pregnancy in the last 20 weeks I could have a PhD by now.
The thing is, all this worrying wasn't really a new thing for me. It's just that suddenly every other worry I had in my life lost importance and all my energy funnelled into the fact that I had this Very Important Baby to worry about. Every day that passed my attachment to this unknowable being inside me grew stronger. But the fact that growing this baby wasn't something I could make happen with to-do lists and step by step instructions drove me crazy.
I tried to tell myself that I shouldn't change my entire life just because I was pregnant. I tried to eat well (which I already did before getting pregnant), drank lots of water, took prenatal vitamins, saw my naturopath and osteopath and tried to keep up my workout schedule. It was about 8 weeks into the pregnancy that I realized I was going to have to slow down a bit. After doing a particularly challenging workout at the gym I had a bit of bleeding and Erik and I ended up in the emergency room for 9 hours. It was a horrible wait only made worse by the fact that there was an 8 month pregnant lady sitting with her friend in the waiting room. I enviously stared at her belly wondering what was going on inside of me. They couldn't really tell us much after 2 ultrasounds by 2 different technicians except that they "thought they could see a heartbeat" and that there was "no way to stop a miscarriage." It wasn't until 5 days later at a private clinic that I got another ultrasound that showed our little amphibian doing super well with a heart rate of 174 bpm. I will never forget the look on Erik's face while he was looking at our baby on the ultrasound screen. It was pure joy and awe and it completely melted me and made me fall a million times more in love with him than I already was. Those 5 days of not knowing if our baby was ok made me realize how much this baby meant to me already even after only knowing of its existence for 4 weeks. I decided that I wasn't going to worry anymore. I told myself that whatever was meant to be would be and that I trusted the Universe and the wisdom of this baby and my body and at this point is when I truly found myself falling in love with the mystery of being pregnant.
I read something last night by an analyst and professor at Harvard Medical, Grete Lehner Bibring, who describes pregnancy as a "normal crisis," and a "point of no return between one phase to the next," where a new self must be constructed. This describes so succinctly what I had not been able to find the words for. Everyone kept saying "Pregnancy is normal, this is what you were built for!" and I would reply "But it is not normal to me, I've never done this."
It took me a while to understand and accept that growing a human is a super mysterious process with not a lot of knowns. I always thought pregnancy would be this thing where you just felt kind of uncomfortable and tired and hungry. I thought that since billions of women before me had gone through pregnancy and childbirth that it wasn't that unique of an experience, so it's surprising to me how I feel that this is hands down, absolutely the most incredible experience of my life.
I had a lot more planned for this post. I wanted to talk about all of the joyful and enchanting parts of being pregnant too, but I will save that for a post later on in the week. I will say that this little baby has taught me so much about myself. I've never been more happy or at peace than I am right now. I am wildly grateful every day for this experience. I think this little bean sprout inside of me is incredibly wise and that I will be learning so many beautiful lessons in the years to come.
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