The story starts here....

Ok admittedly, I stole the idea for blogging about my pregnancy from someone else. My darling husband spends his day obsessively listening to various podcasts while plowing through his work as a video game designer. One such podcast often includes Teresa Strasser – who is currently, from what I can tell by spending this last work day reading through her entire blog, around 36 weeks pregnant.

As I sat here today, using the RSS feed to read the page, so I looked deeply enthralled by the “email” I had received, and attempting to hide my laughing out loud with coughing and throat clearing, I was inspired. She is outright hilarious, but I can be witty at times. And let’s face it, my friends who have had their babies already annoyingly know all about this pregnancy thing, and don’t seem the least bit interested in hearing again how many times I’ve peed today. The others, who are either not into the kid thing, or just aren’t there yet, are too busy leading normal people lives to want to talk to me about that cramp I’ve got that just won’t go away. So why not turn to cyber-space? I mean where else can I feel vindicated, like I’m the only person to ever of suffered this process, if not by blurting out my deep dark secrets and disinterest in doing anything at all on the interwebs?

I write because I’m bored, I write because for some reason I think I’m good at it, I write because it helps me express myself, but most of all I write because it lets me indulge my need to talk incessantly without the nasty side effect of someone else trying to interject. I entertain myself, and if you’re entertained by reading it, I guess I can add that to the success column of my life. If you’re not, then what are you still doing here?

Anyway, back to me.

Here I am. 11 weeks 1 day (and the irony is, since it’s a taboo to even DISCUSS pregnancy before you hit 12 weeks, these posts won’t be seen until I past that mark). Only in pregnancy do you count things by the day. And only in pregnancy do you desperately wait for 12 weeks to pass you buy, obsessing over ever last twinge, and Googling like a mad person from any device capable of accessing the internet. Your searches include any myriad of strange bodily occurrence, followed first by the word “pregnancy” then onto the qualifier of “early pregnancy” and sometimes “miscarriage”. Most of us won’t even type the word, in case the gods of baby gestation take that as a sign or request and spontaneously cause our perfectly healthy, happy, 10 toed fetus to lose its grip on life and simply give up.

So far, I think I’ve Googled “holding pee too long back pain pregnancy”, “no nausea early pregnancy statistics” “less sore breasts in early pregnancy” and so on in a variety of ways. You see, another thing you will only ever do in early pregnancy is wish your boobs hurt more or that you were feeling more like vomiting.

Actually, I want to talk more about this elusive vomiting we’re all supposed to suffer. Now I know from at least 2 very close friends and a darling baby sister that this morning sickness is not only a very real issue for many women in early pregnancy, but a vicious one at that. But for those of us knocked up broads without that as a nasty side effect, it’s actually somewhat less a blessing than you’d think.

You see, if you’re head down in the toilet, vomiting up the jelly beans you had for breakfast and cursing the first few weeks of pregnancy as some cruel joke designed to make you truly ready for motherhood, you at least know you’re really pregnant. Not just, I took 9 home pregnancy tests and the lines came up right away pregnant, but vomiting so much I lost 3 lbs. pregnant. And that in and of itself is a very satisfying and welcome companion to the first few uncertain weeks. For those of us lucky enough not to experience the vomit fest known as the first trimester, we’ve added a whole other layer of neurotic worrying to an already onion sized ball of stress. Not only do we not LOOK pregnant yet, but we don’t FEEL it either. That can’t be good, can it?

All my life I’ve worried about what I would do when I got pregnant and finally vomited. I’m not a puker by nature, and can count on 1 hand the number of times it’s happen to me in the last 15 years. So I was plagued by this vision of myself, talking to a coworker, and randomly puking on them, because I didn’t know it was coming. And I waited for this to happen. I mean, I don’t WANT to puke my brains out, but I assumed it happened to everyone. But it didn’t. 11 weeks and 1 day into this first trimester, and so far all I’ve done is dry heave while picking up dog crap…and this is something that has been known to happen on occasion pre-spawning.

The other less than glorious side effect of the non-vomit first trimester is the lack of ability to extract sympathy from your husband or others around you. You don’t look pregnant, and even if you feel like you’ve never slept before in your entire life, and the bags under your eyes are big enough to pack your house in, no one is waiting on you hand and foot. And even if you pull the “I’m pregnant” excuse, in the absence of seeing your dinner in reverse, people have an even harder time believing it than you do.

To any pregnant ladies or mothers out there who’ve suffered morning sickness (which should really just be called pregnancy sickness, because let’s face it, it doesn’t just happen in the morning), I must sound like such an ungrateful person. I should be jumping up and down thankful I wasn’t sick, and believe me, as I near the end of the first trimester, I become more and more thankful with every passing hour. But in those first few weeks, when you’re so unsure about what is going on, inside your body and your head, some kind of verification that you really ARE hosting what one of my books called “the most effective parasite on the planet” would be welcome. Even if that verification comes in the form partially digested PB&J sandwiches, exiting your body at warp speeds in front of all your neighbours on the front lawn.