Warning: This is a rant. And I wrote it before this happened, so I can’t even blame it on that. Apparently being pregnant just makes me cranky.
The whole concept of pregnancy was not well thought out.
There are so many things that make evolutionary sense. You know, like opposable thumbs and eyebrows and…stuff like that. And yes, pregnancy is a miracle and all that but why does this particular miracle have to be so freaking hard?!
When I was pregnant with Connor I was a little nauseated and more tired than usual, but I could deal with that by closing my office door if I needed to and coming home to lie peacefully on the couch. This time I’ve been so unbelievably sick I can barely stand it and exhaustion has hit like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I feel awful. And this time I have no office door to close and a new team and a 45-minute commute to and from work. Oh, and a three-year-old.
Did I mention I feel awful?
Maybe it’s just anxiety settling in and making itself at home, but I’m looking ahead to the next several months and thinking This is not going to be good. I hope I’ll feel better relatively soon (please God let me feel better soon) but then it’s just that lull before the wow-am-I-ever-uncomfortable stage that leads to poor sleep. I mean, seriously. Who designed this process?! Being tired right before having a baby? Really?!
(And don’t even get me started on how totally dependent human babies are. Not that I’d prefer we make like turtles and leave our young to figure it out themselves, but shouldn’t there be a middle ground? Like puppies. Puppies open their eyes, learn to nurse and then start stumbling around and falling over their own too-big paws. Yeah, the whole housebreaking thing is a total disaster, but if I’d been in charge of evolution I would have made human babies a little more like puppies in the dependency department.)
Image credit: notsogoodphotography on Flickr
But back to being tired. We go from being tired and uncomfortable to being in pain and tired. Even if you have a relatively easy labour, it still takes time to recover and heal. If you have a C-section, however, you spend the first few days needing significant help taking care of your own baby and then the better part of six weeks healing from major abdominal surgery. And all this while having to take care of a baby and learn to nurse (if you choose or are able to do so), and don’t tell me that’s not painful and exhausting too.
Meanwhile, the male (or any other partner, in fact) has no pregnancy woes (aside from listening to his, ahem, whiny wife) and no part of his body is traumatized during the birth. He doesn’t have to deal with engorged breasts or stitches or bleeding. His hair doesn’t start falling out in clumps. He doesn’t have night sweats so bad he has to sleep on a towel for several months. No, all of this joy – pregnancy, birth, the postpartum period – is relegated to one person in the process and it happens to be the person who is also the one who tends to do a lot of the baby care in the early days.
Like I said, pregnancy was not well thought out.
12 weeks down, 28 to go.
