For a German control freak like me, who is highly organized and always on time, pregnancy is a nightmare.
Please don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to meet our little girl, I wouldn’t change this for the world, but I did not enjoy being pregnant. So much that at the moment I don’t know if I will want to have another one in the future.
Until I was 13 weeks pregnant I suffered from horrible all day morning sickness. I had never experienced anything like it. Imagine the worst hungover you have ever had and imagine feeling like this for 7 weeks in a row, without a break.
The second trimester was doable-I had stopped feeling sick, wasn’t too big too exercise or do most things I wanted to do and life carried on in an almost normal fashion.
However as soon as I hit the third trimester other aches and pains started to kick in. I started suffering from horrible backaches, acid reflux, heartburn (which would wake me up every hour at night), loss of appetite, nausea, leg cramps etc etc.
I started walking at the speed of a 90 year old (quite amusing when you catch your reflection in a shop window for the first time, not so amusing when you are in a hurry), could only walk so far until my feet were killing me and just started feeling exhausted all day long.
People who know me in real life know-the worst thing for me always is if my mobility is limited in any way. I am a bubbly ball of energy, always moving, always doing things and loving my exercise. Two years ago I broke my foot, as soon as they took the cast off and with many weeks still to go until I was allowed to walk I sat on my grandmother’s exercise bike for an hour each day as this was the only exercise I could do without putting too much pressure on my foot.
So, sitting at home feeling like an immobile whale is not my favourite thing to do. To put it mildly.
My body has changed of course and even though people constantly tell me how tiny I still am, how neat my bump is, how I will just “pop back into shape” and even though I feel very lucky to have been spared of getting horrible stretch marks, I still feel huge and uncomfortable and just not right, it is like somebody put me into a stranger’s body.
My emotions overall weren’t too bad. I didn’t have any mood swings or rages, I felt pretty much normal, however in the last few weeks I occasionally woke up with bad anxiety attacks. They mostly revolve around fears of giving birth, I wake up in a cold sweat and am convinced I will die during birth. Not that much fun.
My due date is on Wednesday, but I was really hoping she might come a little early, in particular since people around me with similar due date are having their babies right, left and centre. I met a lady yesterday who is due four weeks after me and has an elective C-Section-ergo knows exactly when her baby will come and I am very jealous!
These last few weeks have been quite emotional, you can experience quite a few signs that you think might be the onset of labour only to find they completely stop again. It feels like your body is saying “haha, tricked you!”. This can be very frustrating,
Pregnancy, overall, feels like somebody else has taken total control of my body and emotions and I sit helplessly watching what happens next. I had no idea how much it would change me inside and out, how it would take over my life. I am well aware there are very different kind of pregnancies and everyone feels different about their pregnancy-it is just my personal experience and how I have been feeling.
Now I am just hoping that I will go into labour soon and won’t have to be induced and above everything of course I hope that our little girl will be born healthily and happily and that indeed I will NOT die during labour 😉