8 Months, 2 Weeks, 5 Days

How are you feeling?

It’s what everyone asks when they see my monstrous belly and the immense effort it takes to walk five feet to say hello.

Great! Yeah, really good. I’m ready for the little man to come. Things are awesome. Growing a human is truly amazing.

Lies spew like the stomach acid I puked up this morning before first breakfast.

Growing a human is truly amazing. I know I should feel grateful that this oversized and underused body has formed and carried a perfect human for the last 8 months, two weeks, and five days. And I do!

But I also feel guilty.

Guilty because nestled alongside the immense gratitude is…everything else. The truth is, while my pregnancy has been completely normal by typical standards, it’s been anything BUT the beautiful journey some women are blessed to endure. It’s almost as if the universe is saying: I’ll give you this one, but I’m going to make your life hell so you’ll never consider anything so reckless again.

There’s little sleep and even less comfort when awake. My stomach crawls into my throat at bedtime with the sickly sweet taste of partially digested slurry burning at the back of my tongue. When I move, my bulbous belly follows a few paces behind, strained muscles and ligaments stretching beyond their limits with wrenching pain. My pubic and tailbones feel broken, every move a perpetual kick to the ass and groin. Even sitting must be done gingerly with an ice bottle alternating between the front and back, depending which side aches the most. I can barely walk; breathing is even harder. A stroll from the living room to the bathroom requires a break in my kitchen to catch my breath and work the strain from clenched muscles. Wicked red flames lick my skin like bad tattoos that may never go away. There’s no room in this body for food, but if I don’t eat every few hours I become too dizzy to stand and risk vomiting again, like I still do almost every morning before my first breakfast of peanut butter toast.

I’ve been led to believe it’s a miracle to carry a healthy baby at my age and weight—which I try to remember when I’ve exhausted all viable sleeping positions by 3AM. It’s true I get to do cool things like play with his little feet when they push through my stomach, and tap his butt around the curve of my belly button. It is a miracle. But it’s also agonizing and painful as my organs, bones, and hormones rearrange to play host, then expand and loosen to expel the inhabitant at just the right time.

Every morning I wake up hoping today’s the day my son makes his exit, and every night I go to bed asking him to wait so I can escape my body during a few hours of sleep.

No one said it would be like this. And if they did, I wasn’t listening.

When you ask how I’m doing, these are the truths I don’t want to admit because some women would kill for every ounce of pain and puking I experience in a day for the chance to be a mom. I feel like a jerk complaining about something that leads to life’s ultimate blessing, especially when women I love and care deeply for have had to struggle.

But to pretend I feel only the good stuff would be a lie.

I do feel the good stuff. I’m thrilled to be having a son soon, and grateful that my feet haven’t swollen despite unabashed amounts of sodium, I’ve been gloriously hemorrhoid-free, and my blood pressure is still perfectly low. Believe me, I know how lucky I am as a “geriatric and obese” mother-to-be to make a human. I just can’t deny how truly uncomfortable the last 38 weeks have been.

I almost didn’t say anything. I planned to sit here in silence hoping the memories of this bodily trauma faded with my son’s birth like the vivid dreams of sinking on the Titanic I’ve been having lately. I didn’t want to admit this is really effing hard, and no matter how many pregnant friends I have or meet on social media, I still feel lonely as fuck when every move sends waves of pain shooting through parts of my body I had no relationship with before getting pregnant. I wanted to be tougher than all that. Every single human being on this planet was grown and pushed (or pulled or yanked or cut) from someone’s womb. Who am I to bitch and moan?

And worse, wouldn’t my admissions hurt the scores of other women who want this but can’t have it?

I should feel grateful and stifle the rest, because that’s what mothers do.

This is where I diverge. Here it is: I’m not weak. Pregnancy is hard, I don’t care who you are. We can take baby bump selfies and paint our nurseries and smile; we can also gag at the smell of foods we used to love, cry out in agony when the things we used to do suddenly cause pain, and cry again when we realize we’re responsible for keeping something bigger than a cat alive. It all matters.

And we can—and should—tell the truth without guilt because our side of the story is just as important as the other. To deny those feelings for the sake of anyone else is to belittle our own beautiful, terrible, sometimes downright disgusting journeys as vessels for another soul.  

I don’t want to be ashamed to admit how hard it’s been to be pregnant when it’s the toughest thing I’ve ever done. I’ll tell you I’m fine because I am…or I will be soon. I smile through the pain because it’s worth it.

And I’m sharing this now because my truth is worth it too.