Excuse me as I venture today into the realms of the sentimental…

The other day, before going to the cinema to see the ‘ok in an “I wouldn’t watch it again” kind of a way’ Oscar winning South African film Tsotsi, and whilst eating a mixed grill in the ‘best Turkish grill in London’ that I like to call lambland with RawSausages and Genius, we were discussing my latest bout of pregnancy related discomfort, and he asked me if I had enjoyed my pregnancy at all.

Which made me stop and think.

My pregnancy book divides chapters into months of the pregnancy. And at the beginning of each month, I have read the next chapter to be prepared for what could be coming up. Babyfather commented in my first trimester that if we read of a possible symptom in the book, I was bound to have it. And it does seem to have been a textbook ‘confinement’.

In the eight months since conception, I have experienced (in vaguely chronological order): morning sickness; constipation; food aversions; food cravings; a migraine which lasted a week; anaemia; loss of appetite; dizziness; erratic emotional outbursts; fatigue; muscular pain in the abdomen; aching bones in the pubis and pelvis; groin pain; swollen ankles after flying; increasing back pain; swollen wrists leading to carpel tunnel syndrome, pins and needles in my hands, and the inability to wear my rings; worse constipation and an outbreak of piles; inability to sleep at night due to the discomforts listed above and the fact that my now mammoth belly is in the way; and most recently, extreme terror over the idea of giving birth. In addition, I have suffered greatly with travelling on public transport – the tube making first trimester nausea unbearable, and the rudeness of people who don’t offer seats to visibly pregnant women having more than once led to me bursting into tears on the number 38 (including this morning: what happened to the English being a well-mannered nation?) Moving house and problems at work have meant that my stress levels have shot up, and worrying that the stress is hurting my baby has compounded this.

Not planning a pregnancy, I wasn’t in great physical condition when I conceived, with my fractured coccyx in particular having added to my discomfort. If I were to do it again (after all this!) I would ensure that I got healthy first to try and avoid as much of that list as I could.

But it only took me a couple of seconds of thinking before I answered RawSausages in the affirmative. When I told Blonde my news, before Babyfather and I had decided whether we were going to go ahead with the pregnancy, she told me ‘no one ever regretted having a baby, and lots of women have regretted getting rid of an unborn one’. And despite all of my concerns and fears, despite all of the discomfort, I am sure that what is about to happen to me will be the most rewarding thing I have done. I just hope that I am able to do my child justice.

The Queen of Cakes and I have an ongoing ‘dysfunctional family of the week’ mantle which gets passed back and forth depending on levels of jaw-dropping behaviour in our respective families, (she will excuse me for commenting that she currently wears this, as her brother knowingly tried to set her up with a man last week who, it turned out, is friends with the men who murdered her sister’s husband a year and a half ago) and I commented to her yesterday that my own little offshoot of my family is already in danger of being a regular wearer of this mantle, and one of the members hasn’t even been born yet. So I am going to spend the next few weeks trying very seriously to work out how best to give my child a stable, loving environment amidst all the uncertainty of its immediate environment and all the ‘evilitude’ of the wider world.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 10:26 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.