Pregnancy: is it hard or is it easy?

This morning I cracked it. After not being able to get to sleep last night, I went to go sleep on the couch. While setting up my pillows I knocked a glass off the coffee table where it smashed all over the tiles. So at midnight while everyone else in the house was asleep, I had to get the dust buster and pick up all the shards of glass and vacuum all the shrapnel up. The most frustrating part? I have done this exact thing FOUR TIMES now. On four separate occasions I have come out to sleep on the couch, only to accidentally knock over a left over glass off the coffee table with the pillows that I was holding under my arms. Like deja vu, exactly the same each time. After cleaning up the glass, I lay on the couch reading until well past 1am. When I finally got to sleep, I had dreams about labour and kept waking up every ten minutes because my hips hurt so much from sleeping on my side. All I want to do is SLEEP ON MY BACK. I kept waking up on my back and freaking out, only to roll onto my side and feel the pressure of the pregnancy weight pressing down on my hips.

At 6am, I make my way back to bed, only to see the vacuum hose still not put away, only to hear the fucking cockatoos outside my bedroom window in the gum tree, only the hear the constant drip…drip…drip of the shower head which I have done EVERYTHING to fix and I had just had enough. My husband came in to kiss me goodbye before his shift for work and I let loose. He comforted me and listened to my whinging (and put the vacuum hose away), but at the end of it all I felt guilty. Why did I feel guilty? I have a right to vent after having a crappy night, but still I felt bad.

This is what I want to talk about today. I don’t have a word for it yet (Pregnancy-guilt? Reverse pregnancy psychology?) but hopefully this article will be able to explain this weird phenomenon a lot of pregnant women experience: trying to find the answer to the following question “is pregnancy hard or easy?”

Pregnancy is HARD

Pregnancy is really hard to deal with. Everything about you changes in a really short space of time. Physiologically, emotionally, mentally, it all changes. And it all changes at the drop of a hat. The second implantation happens, the biological changes in your body go to work immediately, and if your body is sensitive or you are in tune with what is happening your body, you can pick up those changes within days. This is all regardless of the fact of how hard it is for some women to even fall pregnant (this post is not about infertility though, so I won’t really touch on that). Between morning sickness that can be so debilitating that you need to be bedridden (a friend of mine had HG and had to take weeks off work; she was basically stuck in bed the whole time because the walls wouldn’t stop spinning), to food aversions, cravings, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, faintness, incontinence, stretch marks, back pain, hip pain, leg cramps, swelling, bloody noses, difficulty breathing, haemorrhoids, constipation, diarrhoea (sometimes the two at once) weight gain, weight loss, headaches, and insomnia you can forgive a pregnant woman to be cranky when she has all this going on. On top of it, she is still expected to put on a smile, go to work, look after the kids she already has, cook and organise dinner, and do it every day. And this is just all of the physical stuff you have to deal with for 9 months. NINE MONTHS! That’s basically a whole year! Put in trimester four when you are healing a wound in your uterus the size of a dinner plate while looking after a newborn and you have a full 12 months of hell.

The emotional toll it takes on pregnant woman is also debilitating. Hormonal, mental and emotional changes to your body and identity are huge factors for developing PND. Along with that, being pregnant is actually pretty isolating. You develop something that I call “The Pregnancy Filter”. Once you become pregnant, that’s all other people can see. Goodbye questions about you and your interests or what’s happening in your life, it’s now all about baby. How is the baby? When are you due? Are you going to breast feed? Are scared? You know you don’t need pain meds, our bodies are equipped to handle the pain naturally. How about you ask me a question about ME: "how was your weekend?" is a good place to start. Throw in comments about pregnant women’s size (I have a whole article on that is you would like to check it out “Coming to terms with your new pregnancy body”) and all the visual stimuli from the media about how a pregnant woman should look, how to “bounce back fast” and it is enough to make any woman scream at the top of their lungs.

We are constantly being told by society and, annoyingly, other older women who have ”been there done that” with being pregnant, that it’s not so difficult. “I did it, you can too” is the mentality that all us preggos are supposed to take on board. Take it on the chin. She’ll be right. You’re LUCKY after all, you managed to get pregnant, do you know how hard that is? Enjoy it while you can! After all, you chose to get pregnant, you chose to do this, you have to deal with the consequences of it. So suck it up princess, quit your whining and get on with it- the dishes aren’t going to wash themselves now are they? And maybe you don’t get told this directly, but on some societal level it is subconsciously inferred that pregnancy is your choice and therefore you need to live with the affects of it, and if you don’t like it there is something wrong with you (after all, pregnancy is a miracle, right?) You can’t complain; you wanted this (if it is indeed a planned pregnancy). Which then makes pregnant woman feel really guilty about wanting to vent about their discomfort and frustrations. After hearing society tell you how lucky you are to be pregnant at all, you feel guilty about not enjoying it so much. So what do we do? We bottle it up, suppress it, put on a smile, and tell everyone “yeah, I’m going really well thanks” because that’s what society wants us to do. It’s also easier than explaining the war that is raging inside you.

Pregnancy is EASY

Pregnancy is actually really easy. People have been doing it for millions of years, and hundreds of millions of babies are born every single day. You know what’s hard to deal with? Living with a terminal illness. Living with depression. Living with a debilitating disease that you have to endure every single day. Pregnancy is a blip in the radar of your life when it comes to inconvenience. 9 months is nothing in the grand scheme of things, and for those 9 months, you don’t really need to do anything anyway. Our bodies are so complex, so well designed, that we don’t have to think about being pregnant- like breathing, our bodies do everything for us. All we have to do is make sure we do the right things (not lifting heavy things, eating the right foods etc).

At the end of the day, millions of women in millions of different scenarios are giving birth: women in slums, rape victims, disabled women, women with highly complicated pregnancies, woman in war torn countries, and they are all able to do it and survive (and have their babies survive!) There are so many people on this planet, there is “one born every minute” so its not like being pregnant is anything special. Women get pregnant all the time, whether they want to or not. Some mild frustrations and limitations for a year of your life is worth the sacrifice for having your child in your arms. It isn’t like you are unable to function while pregnant; for the most part of the pregnancy (provided it’s uncomplicated) you can still go about your daily life with little interruptions. That’s why as a society we SAY that pregnant women are special (“growing a life inside you, how amazing and magical”) but we don’t really think it. As a society, our mentality towards pregnant woman is more “how hard can it really be? Millions of women do it every day.”

My final thoughts

I think the mindset needs to change from “how hard can it be really?” to “why aren’t more women talking about how hard/easy they find it?” Some women will find pregnancy really easy, and they will love it. Some women find it really tough, tougher than all the things I mentioned in the paragraphs above. But just because somebody else has it bad, doesn’t mean that you too don’t have it tough. And yes, technically you don’t really have to “do” anything because your body does it for you and takes the wheel. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a major upheaval in your life. Sure, there will be days that are easy, but most days are really hard. Overall, we shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about venting our frustrations about this major change in our lives.

I conclude that pregnancy is hard. Motherhood is hard. We are expected to just deal with the difficulties, as if it’s some sick form of initiation into the “motherhood club”. And until we take away the ideas and constructs that it is something that woman are “expected” to go through and experience because “we’ve all done it” then the attitude towards pregnant women won’t change. Maybe it never will- I mean, we have had pregnant women for eons now and nothing has changed? The best thing you can do is talk to people about it. Shed light on the issue. Don’t bottle it up, don’t put on a smile and say that “everything’s okay” if its not, because it helps no one and nothing. Be the voice of truth, so we can help each other.

Love, The Feminist Mum.