6 weeks, 4 days.

22nd August 2023

6w4d

I already feel like I’ve been pregnant for a lifetime. When else does an illness stick around for such a long time? I’m not saying the baby or pregnancy is an illness, but this never ending mild nausea sure feels like one. Finding out so early (we’ve already known for almost 3 weeks!) has just given us extra time to be concerned about the possibilities and hyper conscious of my symptoms.

Current symptoms include:

• Increased sense of smell and therefore taste. This has so far resulted in an inability to eat things as simple as roast potato and carrot, and as complex as almost anything else. Toast is my friend.

• An inability to predict ahead of time what foods are a good idea to eat, and which will end in pain, misery, and an indefinite aversion to them.

• Dairy sensitivity! One of the “sounds good but wasn’t” foods mentioned above was a massive, glorious homemade spinach and ricotta cannelloni, with 3 different types of cheese. The leftovers in the fridge are certainly safe from me.

• Gagging while brushing my teeth. Cute.

• The sudden, lightning bolt realisation that I am growing a being inside of me - that I am not alone - in mundane moments like watching the TV or waking in the night. Fucking terrifying.

• Constant burping and gas pains. Also cute.

• The sense at all times that I am both sickly full and sickeningly starving. Not being able to discern between the two and often choosing the wrong solution.

• A subtle but ever present nausea that follows me all day. Every once in a while I’ll think “God, why do I feel so terrible all the time?” before I realise that a) I’m fucking pregnant and b) it’s not that bad.

• A mild crankiness, on account of the mild nausea. No one likes feeling crummy.

• An inability to say the words “baby” or “pregnant” in regard to myself. Not knowing how to tell people when both the phrases “we’re having a baby” and “I’m pregnant” feel like foreign lies coming out of my mouth. Being both deeply excited and suspicious of telling anyone.

Speaking of, we’re seeing my Mum this weekend, and have decided it’s probably time to let her in on it all. If we tell my Mum, we’ll surely end up telling Lewis’ as well. These feel like the most significant reveals. They’re the two people in our lives who have gone through what I’m currently doing - they were once not Mums, they got pregnant, and they are now Mums. They’re the mother figures, and they’ve laid the path I’m following. They’re the ones who wear the title like a name that will eventually, I suppose, feel so normal to me as well. They’re also the ones who will likely be the most excited. My Mum already has some grandkids, my two nephews, but I’m sure she’ll convince herself pretty quickly that we’re having a girl and will get giddy about it. Lewis’ side has no babies or kids yet. His own generation of cousins and grandkids - all mostly in their 20’s and 30’s - are still the kids of the family. It’s always jarring to break the ground of a new generation. We’re going to set off a few existential crises, I think. It’s one thing to have kids or grandkids that you know are old enough to have their own children, it’s another to suddenly be made aware that you are the Grandma now. Lewis also isn’t the eldest, he has an older sister, who, as far as I can tell, wants kids of her own but is battling chronic illness and knows that taking it on right now isn’t in her best interests. I hope that, when we eventually tell our siblings, she doesn’t feel like we’ve taken a role that should be hers. There’s a lot of other people to consider when adding a new human to the planet.

There’s also, I guess, myself. I’ve never been one for, what do they call it, “looking after myself”. Urgh. I’ve never liked exercise and my food choices have always been guided by taste over nutritional content. I’ve tried to be a bit more on top of it the last few years, trying to solve the mysteries of my body in order to get to this pregnancy goal. But that mostly involved guilt around carbs and sugar, and a whole lot of supplements. I lost and then regained about 10kg, but I never managed to incorporate exercise, no matter how many health professionals told me it would make all the difference to my PCOS management and health. Now that the Main Health Goal is achieved - assuming it all goes well and the pregnancy successfully continues - my body is not my own and is going to be undertaking a monumental, unprecedented (for me) task that I, theoretically, should prepare physically for. URGH. I DON’T WANT TO. I have managed to cut down my work to 4 days a week, which is glorious, I’m so pleased. From now on I’ll have Wednesdays off, under the guise of needing appointment time for a yet-unspecified-to-my-workplace medical condition. Really, I just don’t believe in 5 days a week work, and it was always the goal to cut back (we’re lucky financially that we’re able to make these sorts of decisions). But it made sense to do it now, I really will need appointment time (eventually) and more days to rest. In my optimism, I also mentioned to Lewis that I’ll have time to do some pre-natal-something. Yoga or pilates or swimming or whatever it may be. That’s a lovely idea… in theory. In the same way that getting up early and going to boot camp sounds like a great idea the night before when you’re feeling sickly full following an indulgent dinner. But when you wake up, it’s dark, cold (it’s always cold in Melbourne), you’re cosy in bed with the love of your life and a cute wittle doggy sleeping soundly beside you, nothing but staying right there sounds like a good idea in that moment. Having a day off mid-week to look after myself sounded like a great idea when it wasn’t an option. Now that it is, I’d rather use it to catch up on rest, grocery shopping, housework and/or generally not doing much.

Okay, this is just becoming a rant about wanting to be able to retain my laziness when I’m about to become a mother and never know rest again.

Finally, we are getting a dating scan tomorrow, despite already knowing the gestation to the day thanks to obsessively tracking my cycles. We wanted to get a little visual to make it feel a bit more real before starting to tell our parents (read: mothers, we haven’t even discussed when to tell our Dads yet). I’ll be 2 days off 7 weeks. I keep trying to tell myself that it’s unlikely we’ll get to see the flicker of a tiny grain-of-sand-sized heartbeat, but ya know, I’d really like to, if possible, please? It’s also the only scan so far that Lewis will be present for - which is normal, for most pregnancies, but I just happen to have already had 2 early scans, and I’m excited for him to finally see the weird little grey blob bobbing around inside me. It’s all very surreal. The nausea, the hands on my belly, the thinking about family cars, let alone seeing the reality of what my body is capable of. Growing a PERSON. A human PERSON. INSIDE my human person! I really don’t think we dwell on it enough. Pregnancy is fucking surreal.