PREGNANCY IS NOT RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS

Hello everyone! I’m back and pregnant!

YES, PREGNANT.

It has been so hard for me to hide it from you all for the past 5 months since this is the first time I ever experience this and I’m very vocal with practically everything!

I still can’t seem to wrap my mind around this, though! I’m growing a human being?! Me? Can this be?

I’m so excited to meet my little girl and see my husband, who I met as a college student, become a father. It’s  surreal – right out of a movie plot!

Also browsing online for nursery ideas, strollers and cute little size 0 shoes is my dream come true! I always imagined doing that and now I actually can without being weird because, let me say it again: I’m actually pregnant!

But I wasn’t always this happy. It’s just this past week that I am enjoying this journey. Prior to that, it was like an endless trip from Greece to Australia with a hell of a lot of turbulence, a crying baby in the front seat, and a smelly, snoring passenger sitting right next to me. It was like I experienced two delayed connections and a never-ending layover in a cold airport without an available seat to rest my back. Man, it was a nightmare.

Doctors and scientists out there, hear my plea! Please find a way for us to give birth in 3-4 month. It’s 2018 for F’s sake, people have been to the moon, Donald Trump is the US president, Tsipras won Greek elections twice and we also had a Brexit! You cannot say I ask for too much when all I ask for is a short-lasting, healthy pregnancy, can you??

“Pregnancy is the best period of a woman’s life”.

SPOILER ALERT: It is not!

Oh no, no. Being pregnant is a constant struggle, especially if you are a responsible woman. You struggle both physically and mentally and at times you want to bang your head through a wall.  And I do not speak only out of personal experience nor from what I’ve heard from all my female friends and family members. I spoke with ladies from all over the world and created polls in several facebook groups that I joined the moment the test came out positive.

When you find out you are pregnant, and after those first tears (I’ve had them since I was really anticipating this), you will have a brief month to digest the news and be happy about it in ultimate secrecy. No one is supposed to know until the end of the first trimester and the reason why is exactly where the torture begins.

Absolutely everything can go wrong during those first few months. The baby is not even a baby yet, more like a bean in your uterus. Your body thinks you have a parasite and it fights with all its power to get rid of it! My doctors said no gym, no sex, no running, no stairs, no karate moves (I love doing those), no heavy lifting, no hard labor, basically no nothing. Everything you do, triple check in your mind to see if it’s in the “doctor approves” list.  Charming start, right?

What broke me though wasn’t that early stage. It all started at week 8 and lasted up until week 17, almost 10 really long weeks! So much vomiting, dizziness, migraines, nausea all day long, weakness and loss of appetite – well it was pointless eating anyway. And I came to wonder… what do I have growing inside of me? Is it surely a baby? Mercy! I have never felt so exhausted, ever. This comes from a person who has had 6 surgeries in her life and several food poisonings. But nothing compares to this constant pain and torment I felt, which just ended last week. NOTHING.

Then we have a medical test we do between week 11 and 13 where you find out the chances of your baby having a disease such as down syndrome etc.

SHOOT. ME. NOW.

And you start thinking what would I do? I mean, my baby will be healthy… but what if 1 in 1000000, it is not? Do I have an abortion? Having heard the heart and seen the head and legs of this bean, every scenario becomes harder to think about because you start realizing it’s not a bean anymore, but an actual baby and you have your ultrasound pics to prove it. And that brings us back to the mental struggle and our wishing our main concern was still the nausea. What a wanker.

All I can tell you is that pregnancy is not at all rainbows and unicorns. How could it be? You are creating life inside your body. You are responsible for something so fragile and tiny yet there isn’t much to do apart from wait. You have to build a strong level of patience that will be your future best friend once the baby is out crying every 2hrs and shitting melted dragon balls all over itself. You have to be patient once it starts talking and building a character and asks you “But why mommy” 762 times a day. You thought it would be easy, maybe even fun?? THINK AGAIN!

It can also get lonely if none of your friends are pregnant or have kids because your priorities change, as well as your interest in what-color-should-i-paint-my-nails kind of topics. You might find yourself going through a phase of filtering your friend’s list while preggo and it is absolutely normal.
It’s normal that when you go through a major change in your life, you leave several people behind because you just cannot relate anymore.

It’s sad especially if they were a close friend but don’t let that frighten you! Change is good! New people will enter your life in no time.

I am lucky because 2 of my close friends do have kids and they were my support system in times when I thought I would go crazy or was too ashamed to ask my doctor if the baby is fine because I sneezed too hard! Yup, first time moms think about stuff like that!!

So here we go, a new chapter  in this crazy world of life. I leave you with this: Pregnancy will change you forever. Your body, your soul, your mind, your environment – EVERYTHING. It’s not gonna be easy. But the result is what makes it all worth it!