With just over 10 weeks to go (hopefully!) until we meet the littlest Matthews, I’m not quite sure where my pregnancy has gone. Looking at my overly full calendar for the next three months it feels as if he’s going to be here in no time at all, and although I can hardly wait, I still feel completely unprepared and overwhelmed at the thought.
Two weeks into the third trimester I now understand why this journey is broken up into three distinct parts. The first trimester is mostly spent feeling absolutely worse for wear, whilst at the same time struggling to decide how long to keep this beautiful little secret to yourself for. With so much going on both physically and emotionally you ultimately land up spending weeks on end feeling horrid AND isolated which is not the greatest combination of emotions. You also start to feel pregnant pretty early on and despite feeling larger every week (mostly due to relentless bloating), I can guarantee you that further into your pregnancy you will look back at the photos you took and wonder what on earth you were complaining about.
The second trimester, in my experience, was quite wonderful. My nausea and food aversions kindly departed promptly at 12 weeks, and for the next 13 weeks I felt pretty great. My energy levels came back, my appetite was once again normal, and I didn’t really feel pregnant in that I didn’t feel particularly different to before besides some obvious physical changes. I loved the second trimester because not only do you finally start looking pregnant as your stomach pops around week 20, but you also start to feel your baby moving around. Lying on the couch at night and feeling him constantly kick, roll, and squirm fast became one of my favourite parts of the day and it’s something I’m going to very much miss after he’s born.
The third trimester is still fairly unwritten for me, but I can tell it’s not going to be half as much fun as the second. I’ve started feeling pregnant at last. Although the journey has been incredibly kind to me so far, with my belly growing rapidly week on week I’m fast becoming a bit less agile, feeling a bit heavier, and getting increasingly uncomfortable. The third trimester I feel is a bit of a downhill slope after the wonder of the second trimester. I think this is where it all starts getting serious, and where time will eventually seem to be standing still.
For me and Kyle the next few weeks are filled with celebrations, finishing off the nursery, tackling the long list of things we still need to buy, and just enjoying the time we have left with just us two and the dogs. As with most of my life chapters I love to sit down and reflect on the journey so far. I have so many lessons I have learned already, and so many I will probably still learn in the next few weeks. But for now here are the 5 things I wish I had known before it all started…
5 things I wish I knew about pregnancy before I fell pregnant:
1.Enjoy NOT being pregnant.
Seriously. Although the journey to conceiving can be incredibly stressful, particularly if there are additional challenges you have to overcome as you navigate it, once you do fall pregnant there is a finality of it that that feels like a very large full stop at the end of a sentence. It marks the end of an entire book, and the start of a new one. It’s similar to the feeling of finishing a book you just could not put down, and although you were desperate to finish it and can’t wait to read the sequel, you can’t help but feel sad that the book is now over. Enjoy not being pregnant just as much as you hope to enjoy being pregnant, because once the book is done, it’s done.
2. You won’t really look pregnant until halfway through your pregnancy.
Shocker, I know. As soon as I found out I was pregnant I was so excited to have a round little belly. I thought it would happen far sooner than it actually did, but alas, your tummy only really rounds out at around the 20 week mark. Before that you’ll spend a large portion of time feeling huge but looking no different (although you will mostly likely feel as if you look much larger) and another portion of time feeling huge and just looking like you’ve put on some weight.
3. Your self-image will be challenged to its core.
Some people love being pregnant (I feel as if I have mostly been one of these people) and some people hate it. But everyone who goes through this journey will be confronted with a severe blow to their self-esteem at one stage or another. Your body is going to change. Your muscles are going to soften. You will put on weight. Your skin may or may not rebel against the process. You will have days where you feel beautiful, but you will most likely have more days where you don’t. You’ll have many days where you don’t at all feel like yourself and you will worry about ever looking like yourself again. It WILL happen and it is so normal, although that doesn’t make it any easier to navigate. All I can suggest is being gentle with yourself and finding a way to handle it with grace. It’s not going to be forever and I’m sure we will all feel like ourselves again one day soon. Or so the women who have gone before have said.
4.You will feel overwhelmed and out of your depth.
The list of things to do and get is endless. The amount of change facing you head on is terrifying. It’s a huge deal having a baby and no matter how much you want one, it is still going to be scary. No one really knows what they’re doing the first time around, no matter how calm and organised they may seem. Find a tribe of women who can support you through it – women you have been there before you and women who are walking the same path as you. Overwhelm is always easier to deal with when you know you’re not feeling it alone.
5. It will be more incredible than you could have imaged.
Despite all the parts of pregnancy that are difficult, scary, and less than glamorous, it truly is one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had. Watching my body change and grow over the past 7 months as it grows an entire human being has given me so much respect and admiration for not only what we as women are capable of, but also life in general. Conception, pregnancy and child birth are things we have so little control over at the end of the day, yet watching as a life force far beyond us takes charge of this journey is magnificent. Feeling your child grow and move inside of you is something you can’t quite put into words, and I will so miss being home to this little soul who I already love so much.
xx