Occasional missives from the journey to motherhood. Like in: part one, part two, part three, part four and part five.

The Last Week

The Hard Stuff

Wanting to Work

And not being able to work. Whether because of migraines, randomly falling asleep, wedding deadlines, having a panic attack, or other craziness.

I like to work every day. It’s the best part of my day. And when I can’t, I miss it.

Full-scale freakouts

Kind of intense ones, even for me. With writhing and screaming and tearing of hair and much not being able to breathe.

Also a few scary almost-incidents with a few household objects.

David came out of it with a whole comprehensive plan for when I “get like that,” and greater insights into this, that and the other thing. I am incapable of having coherent thoughts about any of it, but he does know how to calm me down, for which I’m grateful. I just wish I knew how to calm me down.

Though I did have a Shivanautical epiphany I’ll talk about in a bit. Even with all the help, evenings are guaranteed to be rough.

Ahahaha now the nausea is worse

I refuse to call it morning sickness because that’s stupid and inaccurate. I tend to feel best in the morning.

At any rate. It was plenty awful before, but now I am violently disgusted by anything that is not whatever I’m craving in the moment.

To eat I must:
a.) Figure out what I’m craving, if possible. “It’s kind of a salad-y feeling, but the dressing has to be ranch, the lettuce romaine and there must be croutons. I think. Otherwise I want soup…” Or “Ripe pears cut in slices with chevre on top and one medjool date.”
b.) Find that food somehow, somewhere, if possible.
c.) Hope to God the first steps happened fast enough that this is still what I’m wanting.

Our house doesn’t fit

Really abruptly, everything about our apartment feels off. It’s suddenly tiny (though we both have much less stuff now than when we moved in), inconvenient and just plain wrong.

Fortunately, we get to buy a house soon! Unfortunately, “soon” means at least several months, possibly a year, away. In the meantime, it’s like being constantly grated with sandpaper.

The moderately helpful

Belly band!

So I’m definitely showing, if by showing you mean “have a bloated belly that has nothing to do with the babylet’s size and everything to do with water retention.”

And I got one of those band things to hold up my unbuckled pants and it is GENIUS. I am so comfortable! All the time!

Shivanautical Epiphanies

I did a bunch of Shiva Nata this week, and while asking my future self about tax advice, of all things, I had a great epiphany.

My future self said, more or less: “Every little thing in your life is falling apart right now. And there’s the pain you have to feel because you’re releasing it, but there’s also the pain of trying to hold onto structures that need to deconstruct.”

I said something grumpy back about how my life keeps falling apart and I don’t make any progress and she reminded me:

“Deconstruction and reconstruction rely on elements you’ve created and arranged. Just because it’s falling apart doesn’t mean there aren’t useful building blocks still intact. Trust that everything you’ve built is there, just becoming a stronger more congruent version of itself.”

That had made me feel a lot better.

Babies in the Womb

I already knew tons about the intense effects intrauterine life has on people for the rest of their lives. (Don’t get me started on “nature versus nurture” or I will scream at you. Because that question has been definitively answered and it’s “both, intimately, all the time, interconnected, starting in utero.”)

But I did not know that babies learn appropriate vocalization by receiving a mother’s stress or love hormones while listening to the sounds she makes. If she’s in an argument or upset, they receive hormones inducing them to feel that way as well, while listening to the sounds she makes. Same for joyous, calm, or exciting occasions.

Babies born of mute mothers don’t know how to cry correctly, if at all. Isn’t that fascinating? I’m wowed.

There is comfort in doing the best you can

What with all my reading on the lifelong effects of maternal anxiety during pregnancy, I could be feeling guilty and afraid.

But some part of me somehow has really internalized the fact that guilt doesn’t help. Fear doesn’t help. I’m am doing the very best that I can, and supporting myself is the only thing that’s going to make it any better.

So it’s more like: “Well, that was three hours of terror last night that I wish the babylet hadn’t been hormonally experiencing whilst its brain forms. On the other hand, right now I am able to feel good, loving, and hopeful, so I’ll send some of those hormones the babylet’s way. Hope it helps.”

Sex helps everything

David has a complicated theory about how sex is more important to me now because of various things that have to do with tantra and polarity and etc. He has a blog about that stuff, if you’re interested.

I think that’s all probably true, but mostly I just really like sex. Someone told me in the second trimester I’d be “way randier” and my first thought was “impossible.” My second thought was: “How would we get anything done?”

Fin!

That’s the weekly wrap-up for preggo land. Wish me happy food hunting and a few days of focused work on something other than wedding invitations.

Comments!

With sovereignty and love, yes?

Mwah!
Rhiannon