The First Trimester: Woe and Wonder

I think many people don't spend much time talking about their first trimester. Most likely this is because it is conventional wisdom to wait to tell family and friends that you are pregnant until the first trimester is past and you are widely recognized to be through the "danger zone." Trevor and I recognized that by telling our immediate family and close friends right away, we were taking a calculated risk, but we're blabbermouths and keeping it to ourselves in the case of phone and face-to-face conversations with those people was simply not feasible. As a side effect this means that many people, outside of just Trevor, are having to live with day by day updates on my first trimester angst. I apologize for that and I hope that I can get some of it out of my system here so that the next time someone asks me "how are you feeling?" I can comfortably lie and say "fine," knowing that if they read our blog they are aware that "fine" is not in the first trimester vocabulary. Here, for your general amusement, is a recap of more appropriate first trimester answers to the dreaded "how are you feeling?"

Nauseous. Read as every morning. Worse the past few days than it had been before. Pregnancy has its own weird kind of nausea. The kind that is not helped by throwing up or by doing anything, other than pretending it is not happening, consuming way more saltines than any normal human being should and laying around in the morning, "to digest" which sort of makes me feel like a lazy housecat.

Tired. Here is where I am feeling ripped off. All these pregnant women have told me that in their first trimesters they were super tired and slept 20 hours a day. Great. I love sleep. Bring it on. But, alas, while I have the enormous fatigue and seem to turn into a pumpkin at 9:30 or so, I have not had more than 7 hours sleep in a night since becoming pregnant. Don't get me wrong, I am not per se complaining about 7 hours, I am just pointing out that there is a huge distance between 7 hours sleep and 20 hours sleep. A distance magnified when you spend an additional 45 minutes of your 7 hours on trips to and from the bathroom. Now, I would be fine with my measly 7 hours if I weren't fatigued all the time, but I am tired, and yet unable to nap or get an obscene amount of sleep at night. Sigh.

Moving on to the good stuff:

Fascinated. Even the bad symptoms are fascinating. The first few days of nausea are even exciting and adventurous. "Wow! Look what's happening!" It goes a long way toward making the pregnancy seem real. I admit that, even though I yearn to wake up and know I am going to have a full day of feeling fabulous, or even just "normal," each day I am sort of excited to see what my body is going to throw at me. It's easier to feel crappy when you know that the feelings are a part of supporting a new life.

Grateful. Every day I wake up grateful. Even when I can't imagine how I could possibly eat another cracker or I'm having rolling waves of nausea, I am still hyper aware of how lucky I am. I married a person who makes my soul sing. We have good jobs that we enjoy and I am lucky enough to be able to continue on as a student and a teacher because he makes good money and we have good insurance. We just bought a house. A great house, with plenty of room for us and the baby, in a nice neighborhood, in a city that we love. We have two great dogs. I type this as they sit in back of me fighting over a stuffed goose. They may be a lot to handle, but they keep everything lively. We have wonderful friends and family who have always helped, supported, encouraged and loved us. We got pregnant quickly and easily at a time when we are ready, financially and emotionally (as much as you ever can be) to have a child. All of this makes me grateful. So grateful, in fact, that even when I answer "how are you feeling?" with a decidedly unhappy grunt, what I really mean underneath it all is that I feel blessed.