Jumping the Gun

I have decided that a curious thing often happens to a woman who is pregnant with her first child: she exaggerates. Everything is exaggerated - the changes to her body, the feelings, the side effects. To be perfectly honest, being pregnant has made me somewhat self-centered in the purest sense of the word: I am focused on myself.

Unlike the colloquial meaning of the term "self-centered," I don't get the sense that I am focusing on myself to the exclusion of anyone else. I am still very present in my marriage and my friendships, and I have not wrangled the women around me into boring narratives of my pregnancy experience - unless they seem genuinely interested in which case they are no longer boring narratives. But until yesterday I thought I was looking really pregnant, I was suggesting that Jay talk through my belly to the baby, and I was wondering how the hell I was going to survive getting so much bigger over the next five months.

What happened yesterday, you ask? I had lunch with my friend Leah. Leah is about six weeks ahead of me in her pregnancy and I hadn't seen her in about a month. Granted, she is measuring large for her due date, but she is so much bigger than I am and yet she doesn't look gargantuan by any means. In fact, she looks super cute.

So I came home and looked down at my belly and it occured to me that I have been mentally exaggerating how big I look. And how far along this baby is. In fact, I don't really look all that pregnant in my clothes. I'm 17.5 weeks pregnant, which is not even halfway through. And Jay has plenty of time to talk to the baby, who probably can't even hear anything outside of my body yet. And (this is the topper) I don't think I really felt the baby move two weeks ago. I haven't felt anything since. And most sources say it's very rare for a first-time mom to feel anything before 18 weeks. I think I just had gas. I have been seriously jumping the gun.

Seeing Leah yesterday and swapping experiences made me realize 1) that I have plenty of time to be pregnant and I have only just begun to change, and 2) that we need more pregnancy community. Pregnancy is an incredible, strange, spiritual, moving experience. But it is something about which I don't think we have enough communal knowledge. If I didn't have a couple of friends who are also pregnant I would just have my books and my body to gauge my progress. It can feel somewhat isolating, which is ridiculous considering that we all, every one of us, were birthed by a pregnant woman. The amount of pregnancy knowledge out there, walking around in the heads of millions of women, is vast and detailed and yet not often shared outside of the closest of family and friend circles. If I wasn't trying to finish a doctoral degree, I would try to do something about this - start an advocacy group, a peer group...something to help women find other women with whom to discuss this wonderful, scary experience.

I hope to record most of my experience in this blog, from the round ligament pains I feel when I sneeze, to the terrible hayfever I can't seem to shake, to the benign growing pain menstrual-crampy feelings I have at night sometimes, to the firmness of my uterus when I first wake up in the morning. These are all things that I had to learn about from other women around me - or at least, had to learn that what I am experiencing is well within the bounds of "normal."

Here I am, by the way. I took this photo this morning. To me, I look huge. Still, I have a long way to go...