Being pregnant kind of takes over your life. Between the constant feeding (if I don’t eat every two hours I get sick) and the frequent naps, I’m now basically in the same developmental bracket as a four-month-old. Except I can wipe my own bum.
Also, pregnancy brain is A THING. I can’t think. Literally. Like I can’t hold thoughts in my head. It feels like my right brain is doing push-ups whilst my left-brain keeps hitting snooze. Although sadly this hasn’t stopped my mind from coming up with lots of things to worry about. Examples: Will I get fat? What if I leave the house and I forget my snacks? Is the fluoride in my tap water more likely to harm my baby than the plastic in bottled water? How the hell will I afford a home birth? Have all the unique baby names already been taken? And the big one: how am I going to co-parent with a partner who lives 90 minutes away? My inability to think means that whenever I start trying to come up with solutions to said issues, I immediately get sidetracked and have to go eat/sleep/wipe my own bum.
On a more positive note, growing a human means that you have a get-out-of-jail-free card anytime you do something weird/forgetful/lazy/gross. Which OBVIOUSLY I’ve been using to my full advantage. I’ve also been very much enjoying meditating on my womb area. How surreal that there’s someone living in there. And just to show it’s already taking after its mother, little one has managed to scam its way in rent-free and then eat all the snacks.
Noticing things that help and don’t help:
Doesn’t help:
Technology
Being ten steps ahead of where I actually am
Trying to keep anything I need to remember in my head
Helps:
Nature
Staying in the moment
Writing anything I need to remember on paper
Talking to Axe Man
Connection in general
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with technology but lately it’s gotten worse. It seems that if I spend more than twenty minutes staring at a screen (which takes me totally out of my body) I start feeling pukey. The theme of disembodiment continues with the other things that don’t help. In fact, nothing has made it clearer to me than pregnancy that being anywhere except HERE makes no damn sense. “Stay present or get out the sick bucket” is now my mantra. This is a tad tricky when it comes to dealing with business emails but is also a good way to avoid social media rabbit holes (and other time-wasting, soul-crushing activities). So instead I sleep, eat, press myself to trees (already a favourite past time of mine) and try to be joyful (which is harder than I thought it would be while pregnant).
In between eating, sleeping and tree-hugging I get time to worry about money; how I’m going to pay for my plus-one is a question that I have zero answer to. At present, I’m making my living as a birth doula. It’s deeply meaningful work but not exactly the kind of stuff you can go back to easily after a baby. Being on call 24/7 and attending births that can last as long as three days is already incredibly hard on my body and psyche. Trying to do it with an infant seems, well, laughable. I’ve been meditating and journaling about it and it seems like maybe I’m being called to increase my “life coaching” work (what I prefer to call Soul Doula). But that would require redesigning my website…which is challenging when you want to vomit every time you look at a screen.
Going to keep on with that meditating…