What I Ate When I Was Pregnant

Whatever I could.

Shortest post ever.

Ok, truth?

I promised myself that I would eat well to support my growing baby. I remember walking through a gas station before I got pregnant, thinking that soon I wouldn’t be able to partake in any of their premade breakfast sandwiches or pizza slices because they weren’t healthy for a fetus. I had plans and the best of intentions.

(What’s that they say about the road to hell?)

I wanted to be one of those women who lost weight in early pregnancy from quitting alcohol and eating healthy. If I did lose weight, I was quick to pack it back on—as my doctor’s scale reminded me every month. With my pre-pregnancy body teetering past that morbidly obese margin (god, I hate those words. Morbid. Obese. Gag me with a spoon) I didn’t need to gain more than eleven pounds over the nine months of growing a human. I gained twenty-five. Not a travesty, but I was so large at the end that my bulbous belly left drag marks across the floor from the couch to the fridge.

I didn’t eat healthy when I was pregnant.

There, I said it. I didn’t. In the first trimester I literally ate what would stay down, which was boxed mac n’ cheese, white rice with loads of butter, peanut butter cups, and the breakfast of champions I ate up until the day I went into labor: peanut butter toast with a can of Dr. Pepper. I drank more soda while pregnant than I have since I worked at a movie theater in high school where the tap was free, as if the five minutes of pleasure tiny cans of Mountain Dew gave me after I threw up somehow made up for the wine I couldn’t sip at night, or the Canadian Walleye I caught last summer but couldn’t eat.

I was one of those lucky few women who was prone to puking throughout pregnancy, not just the first few months—and not just in the morning. This didn’t qualify me for any special treatment, just a sympathetic nod from the nurse recording my symptoms before each checkup. Clearly I was getting enough sustenance despite the regurgitation to see a consistent upward slope in my weight chart and grow a baby boy that my doc suggested might be quite large, but was, in fact, a string bean at 7lbs, 4 ounces at almost 41 weeks when he was finally born.

Like everything else, my food choices in pregnancy weren’t what I thought they would be. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the health of my son, it’s that I bounced back and forth between not being able to keep anything down to severe muscle weakness if I didn’t force whatever food I could find down my gullet. Could I have done better? Probably. Was I doing the best I thought I could? Most of the time.

Was my son born healthy? Shockingly, yes.

Moral of the story? There isn’t one, except maybe that it’s pointless making plans when a kid is involved. Just when you think you’ve got your shit figured out, they come in like a wrecking ball to shatter your illusions of control and remind you who’s in charge.

Because from the moment the sperm hits the egg, it’s definitely not you.