I will finally admit that, overall, I enjoy being pregnant.

And saying that makes me feel guilty?

Today, I am 37 weeks and 4 days pregnant. This means that I’m at the point where, if I were to give birth today, it would be considered “fine” and “not early” (some people call this full term, some call it early term, I call it “I don’t have to rush to the hospital as soon as contractions start bc something is wrong”). It also means I beat my one friend’s very early delivery date of 37+3, which I’ve regarded as a milestone. If I make it until tomorrow, I will surpass the first bet in the “Guess the Birthdate” pool I created for our friends and family to try to have a little bit of fun here.

I guess I am close to the point where a lot of women want to be done with the whole ordeal, but I really do not feel that way, very much to my surprise. “Just wait”, people say. But to be honest, I’ve been “just waiting” to be miserable this entire pregnancy, and besides a few weeks during my first trimester, I largely have not felt that way. I’ve been really cautious about using this language, but at this point I think it’s safe to say that I actually have, and am continuing to enjoy, being pregnant???

I’ve always known I wanted to be a parent, but haven’t always known that I wanted to be pregnant. When I was a teenager, I had teen mom anxiety. I made a pact with myself that I would not get pregnant until my 30s. And then sometime during my senior year, I decided I was totally grossed out by pregnancy and I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to contribute to the growing global population and didn’t want to put my body through all of that and so I decided I would eventually adopt.

I got over that one quickly. In my early 20s, decided I would probably hate pregnancy and giving birth, so I figured having one child would be okay. I would have this child by cesarean. If me or my partner (if they existed, I’ve always been clear about wanting to be a parent and was happy to do it on my own if push came to shove) wanted more, I’d go back to my adoption plan.

And then I met the person I would eventually marry and the thought of actually carrying a child started to bring me more and more joy, but I still wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the whole thing. And then I decided to actually learn about pregnancy and childbirth and gestation, started forming my preferences, learned how to track my ovulation, and realized I actually wanted a low-intervention, midwife-powered birth. There’s a part of me that dreams of being in a bathtub when this kid shoots out, but my anxiety begs me to deliver from a hospital so I made that decision early on.

My husband and I had planned on starting to try to get pregnant within our first year of being married, and last summer we finally set a date to start trying. We targeted end of summer, not knowing how long it would take. I jokingly (mostly) referred to last summer as my last summer, and overall prioritized enjoying life overall else—trying to embrace spontaneity a bit more, and underscoring my decisions with one prevailing thought in my head: this is my last chance to live my life as it currently is. I spent that last summer in a serious period of duality, mourning my life as it was while also feeling deep excitement for what the future would bring.

Summer ended, we started trying (which is a weird way of saying I went off birth control and we had frequent sex that was well-timed within my ovulation window, which I spent a lot of time learning about, tracking my basal body temperature, etc) and got extremely lucky—within 2 months, the day before our one-year wedding anniversary, we found out we’d be bringing our kid into the world.

Holy shit. I thought. Here it is. My life old ends now and my new one begins. I woke up at 6 am to pee, took a pregnancy test despite it being 3 days too early, and couldn’t tell if I was seeing things. I texted the picture to my two mom friends who I’d been bombarding with questions for the past few months already (and who I’d continue to do so for, well, it hasn’t stopped yet and probably won’t for a while). I then took a digital test and those are pretty clear!

I got back into bed, deciding I wouldn’t wake up my husband because he was recovering from COVID and he needed his sleep. But there was no way in hell I was going back to sleep.

I can’t remember what I did for the next FIVE HOURS until he woke up. I think I just sat in bed, on my phone, looking stuff up, updating the baby apps that I had already downloaded in anticipation of this to find out my estimated due date. I eventually texted my best friend because I just couldn’t keep this in and needed to tell someone. My husband won’t let me live down the fact that three people knew this before him (besides the cats. I told them too), and he’s kind of right, but also can you expect me to keep this in for FIVE HOURS!?

the cats learning their fate

I bought these ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ baseball caps from Etsy a few weeks ago. I swapped out his regular bedside baseball cap with his ‘Dad’ cap and figured he’d look in the mirror and figure it out quickly.

He didn’t. I had to follow the man around the house and finally told him to look in the mirror. “Yeah, I probably have a bunch of drool on my face. Can you not laugh at me? I have COVID.”

From that point to now, it’s really felt like every decision has been made with this kid in mind. And I imagine that’s very much what being a parent is like, too.

The first trimester slowly progressed, and that was the roughest point of all of this. After about a week, my first symptom hit: food aversions, closely followed by nausea. Devlin made a normal at-the-time dinner for us, salmon, broccoli, and sushi rice I took one bite of salmon and could not swallow it. I haven’t been able to eat salmon, or most fish besides canned tuna, since. After that, I was constantly nauseated, for what felt like many full weeks in a row. My diet consisted of bagels, rice, miso soup, and avocado (the avocado was only if I was lucky). For Thanksgiving, and then a few weeks later at our ‘Friendsgiving’ I basically ate mashed potatoes and dinner rolls (and couldn’t even stomach my stuffing, sadly. I also put on quite the scene pretending to eat my friend’s very strong rum cake). I hated my first trimester, and I expected to feel similarly about each stage of pregnancy (even so, when that period of time was all over one of my two mom friends asked if I would do this again. I answered, very quickly, yes I would. It sucked but I got through it).

First trimester diet, thankful for my husband for prepping food like this for me ❤️

Then, one day in early January, I woke up with a burst of energy! I booked a 9am barre class in Manhattan and felt I’d turned a new leaf. I spent my second trimester with lots of energy, feeling active, and overall feeling pretty great. I traveled for the better part of a day to spend 2 weeks in Rio with my family, and that should’ve been difficult but it really honestly wasn’t. I kept going out, seeing friends, doing some basic workouts, and walking a lot. When I got laid off, I walked even more. When will I hate this again? Probably summer, probably when my third trimester hits. That will suck!

My third-trimester hits and I … still don’t hate this? I get more and more uncomfy as the weeks go on, but it’s nothing that I necessarily feel like complaining about. It’s just my new state. Just a little discomfort here and there, but nothing that detracts from my day-to-day experience of life. Nothing that I hate. This still feels very worth it, I would do it again, and I am overall not in a rush to end this phase and go into labor (I’m also not manifesting going way past my due date, btw, if anyone with any power or control is reading this).

And this makes me feel a lot of things. First and foremost, I feel grateful. But I also feel guilty. So many pregnant people really have terrible times with pregnancy and I don’t know why I was gifted with this pleasant experience. I also have been really lucky to not have encountered any serious complications and am overall told me and the baby are both healthy and progressing well, but I still feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop! Especially this past month, I haven’t been the most active. I haven’t had the cleanest diet and I don’t have the best sleep schedule. I’m not doing All of the Things™ that I intended to to make this a perfect smooth experience, and yet I still feel fine (and most importantly, am still really healthy). I’m grateful but it doesn’t seem fair. And even at 37 weeks, 4 days, there is still a part of me that is expecting to hate this experience at some point! (It’s only getting warmer!)

At a therapy session around this time, I mention that I am still waiting to not enjoy this experience, that I can’t believe I don’t hate pregnancy yet.

“Do you think that maybe you won’t feel that way? That maybe you went into this experience expecting one thing, but now you’re realizing that isn’t you’re reality? Is there anywhere else in your life where you do this?”

She asks this last question because we both know there are many places in my life where I do this. I expect an outcome (usually a negative one) and prepare for the worst. I get consumed by the things I think I’ll feel and then I am ~shocked~ when it turns out differently and I can’t actually predict the future.