One thing that I kept looking for while I was pregnant was other people’s stories. I wanted to hear about their pregnancy and their birth stories. I was very afraid of the upcoming labor, and I found comfort in hearing other women talking about their experiences. And I’m not talking about someone quickly describing the worst pain of their life, and then adding “but once the baby is out, nothing else matters”. No, I’m talking about the whole story. Hearing the story from start to finish somehow comforted me, as I got a chance to hear of other people just like me who made it through just fine. That made me feel that I could do it too. So now I want to share my story, in the case someone, just like me, can find comfort in that. Let’s start with the pregnancy.
The first Trimester
The first pregnancy symptom was a faint nausea when I didn’t eat every like two hours. This started a week or more before missed period, so pretty much right away. At the 6 week mark, from one day to another, the real nausea came into my life and threw my attempts of becoming a vegan right out the door. I could literally almost vomit just by hearing or reading the word Vegan. We were in Zion National Park for our wedding anniversary, and my husband had to stand on the side of the road eating his hummus sandwiches because this mama couldn’t stand the smell of it (and to be completely honest, she couldn’t even stand the smell of the husband himself, after eating hummus, poor poor husband). I remember walking through the store, on the hunt for anything that I could eat. As I passed the shelf with vegan options I just lost it, I couldn’t get myself to find one item in the whole store that I would even consider putting in my mouth. I got through these weeks on gold fish and ice cold apple juice. And just as sudden as it appeared, the nausea disappeared at 13 weeks.
I was going into pregnancy after experiencing a miscarriage just weeks before. Having a miscarriage, even an early one, made me doubt my body’s ability to stay pregnant. So getting pregnant again put me in an anxious mindset from the very start. And having consistent bleeding every few weeks throughout the pregnancy didn’t exactly make it easier. I am a person who tend to worry about things, so all the worrying didn’t come as a surprise, but the degree of it hit me like a rock.
The second Trimester
I thought that the ultrasound and the 12 week mark would calm my nerves about a miscarriage, but the disappearing nausea stole my tranquility. In Sweden, the weeks between when the nausea disappears and when the belly starts to show are usually described as “ghost weeks”, as it’s common to feel just as normal at this phase. And that could not have been more accurate. The only thing I kept feeling was the sense of being constantly bloated, which was probably pretty accurate counting all the pregnancy constipation! Ha, that was one thing nobody told me about, 9 months of the inability to poop.
The fact that no doctor would ever confirm that my bleedings were not connected to another miscarriage was extremely hard for me. I kept asking at every appointment if it was a pending miscarriage, and everyone told me different versions of the same meaning, “the baby is ok right now, but we can’t know if this is the start of a miscarriage”. It wasn’t until I was 23 weeks, and started crying in the doctors office, that this one doctor told me that the risk of this being a miscarriage was unlikely.
Around the 22 week mark I could feel the baby kick every day, and this was a huge comfort to me. I didn’t have to wait until the next doctors appointment to get a confirmation that everything was ok, she could show me that she was fine. The kicks were 100% the best part of being pregnant. It was surreal trying to understand that there was a little tiny person kicking me, and it was the best feeling ever. There were some days where she kicked less (of course), and that triggered my anxiety.
The third Trimester
At around 27 weeks I had my blood sugar test, and it showed that I had gestational diabetes. Which might explain why I gained most of my pregnancy weight before 25 weeks. For someone who almost considered not applying for a green card because of the need of getting a tetanus shot, being told I needed to poke my finger 3 times a day didn’t exactly come as a gift from above. But maybe this was just the therapy I needed. This gestational diabetes didn’t cause many issues for me, other than a possible induction hanging over my head. My blood sugar was rarely out of line, and god knows I didn’t exactly follow the diet.
As I got bigger things clearly got heavier. I tried to walk a lot, but my pace slowed down each day. And the pregnancy waddle really settled into my body. For someone who thought pregnancy wouldn’t affect me (ha ha ha), feeling this out of balance came as a shock. Hormones are not to be joked about, for those who didn’t already know. The closer I got to my due date, the more I wanted to be done with this pregnancy. Once I hit my due date and no baby was in sight, my mood went low. Like real low. I tried to order a salad from Mendocino Farms the day after my due date, but the website didn’t work, and Andy came home to a wife completely covered in tears. Luckily the salad issue got solved, and life could go on. I really wanted to get labor started naturally. But all the long walks and countless pineapples eaten aside, a week past my due date I had to accept an induction. And god knows if I would have been able to last a day longer without being forever banned from Mendocino Farms!
Looking back at my pregnancy I can see just how affected my mood was by all the pregnancy hormones. I can look at the photos taken of me and really see the grey cloud I had hanging over my head. It’s almost like my smile was different, because I wasn’t truly there. Physically I had a fairly easy pregnancy, but mentally I wasn’t feeling like myself and that really challenged me. The craziest thing is that the moment Lea was born, it was like I was reborn. It felt just like someone removed a pair of foggy glasses that I had been wearing for 9 months. I believe this is why the extreme love I have for Pregnancy really came after Lea was born. In the moment I was too busy trying to clean those foggy glasses, that everything kinda passed me by unnoticed. But the second Lea was born, the total respect and honor I feel for the journey really hit me. The fact that we are able to create another human, and then connect with them from within before they are even born into this world is unreal. Un-freaking-real. All hands and legs down for everyone creating humans right now, it is a miracle!
