SNOWBALLS

Okay, so now I’m officially 8 weeks pregnant and I was reading my faithful “What To Expect When You’re Expecting” and in the ‘What You May Be Feeling’ section, I discovered that if I were to take a “How-Pregnant-ARE-You?” test, I’d get a serious A+.  These are the things in the list that I am experiencing:

·      Fatigue and sleepiness

·      A need to urinate frequently

·      Nausea, with or without vomiting and/or excessive salivation

·      Heartburn, indigestion, flatulence, bloating

·      Food aversions and cravings

·      Breast Changes – fullness, tenderness, darker areolas, etc.

·      Occasional headaches

·      Occasional faintness or dizziness

·      Tightness of clothing around the waist and breast, enlarged abdomen

·      Emotional instability comparable to PMS but more pronounced including irritability, mood   swings, irrationality, weepiness

·      Feelings of misgivings, fear, joy, elation

There is only one other item on the list and it’s

·      constipation

That’s the only one that I haven’t experienced (knock on wood). I’ve never had that problem and so happily it hasn’t descended upon me now. I’ll count my lucky stars. The rest of these clear symptoms of pregnancy get giant check marks next to them and I get a serious gold star.

PREGGERS, with first class honours.

How could anyone really not know that they were pregnant after 8 weeks along? I have heard stories that sometimes people don’t realize it unti they’ve been pregnant for 2-3 months! These incredible changes in two weeks are amazing to me; what’s going to happen in another month? It will surely be constant discoverey. It would take a person extremely disconnected with her body to not have a sense of things changing as rapidly as they do. I have sensed these changes since almost the first day after conception but here I am still collecting changes like an out of control snowball and it’s only accelerating it seems as time rolls on. I’m getting thicker, too, just like a snowball.

Last night, I felt my hips and they seemed to be someone else’s, as though they’ve been placed differently on the tops of my leg bones all of a sudden. It felt really strange and I found myself walking differently. And then I realized that I wasn’t just walking differently, I was walking pregnant!  The thing is, even though I’m not really showing (although the bloating could be mistaken for triplets!), I can feel my alignment has shifted and I now understand why some women walk like they’re six months pregnant long before you can see a bump on their abdomen. Everything just feels a bit weird, re-adjusted, off-kilter and I couldn’t help but notice my body’s natural adjustment to these shifts as though I had no say in it. I tried to conscious walk normally and that feels even more strange.

Could my hips have moved so soon?

And these breasts…

Whose are they? I feel as though I must have unwittingly stolen some other woman’s breasts and swapped out my old ones. Though, why would anyone steel oversized, hard, itchy, sensitive rocks that hate being touched and that won’t fit into bras comfortably? Yes, it would be “unwitting” theft, for sure.

After 8 weeks, is this normal?

And even though it’s kind of nice to have a cleavage when my former, mutinous breasts were always just a bit small for that, the extra curviness doesn’t come with a feeling of extra sexiness. It may make my sweetie excited to see me filling out a bit, but I don’t want him anywhere near me, let alone anywhere near my breasts! I keep assuring him that it’s not personal; it’s just the reality of this pregger lady who is bewildered by her own boobs and feeling a bit like an imposter in someone else’s body.

And what do other women tell me every time I mention these things?

“It’s only going to get worse.”

Great. Thanks. Love that line of encouragement…

The good news is that I’ve told several friends around Beijing and have felt a lot of really warm support from them. I’m only 8 weeks along but I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The support has felt nurturing and encouraging, even if the words and stories aren’t always that way.

The next step will be informing my distant friends back home. It’s just too bad that this kind of news can’t be shared in person. Email just seems so… strangely stale somehow. But there’s nothing to be done about that. I’ll reach out soon.

Until then, watch me waddle.