To have a baby with chronic illness, or not

I think we had this conversation two billion trillion times. Ben squirms when I use nonsensical numbers, but I really need to, for expressive reasons. In my acquaintance of people with the same illness, the majority are not partnered and do not have children. I am privileged to have been in a serious relationship before my illness got serious. However there was one friend with ME/CFS who urged us to have a baby. She was the one who had cleared out every baby item after her firstborn, vowing never to go through it again. Three years later, she bought it all again and welcomed a second baby girl. Despite her encouragement and our longing, the idea of introducing a baby into our just-floating existence was frightening. The possible health cons list was just as long as the pros; it was terribly unclear. People twice my age say they are far too tired to look after new babies; yet my beautiful fifty-year old mum has at least double my energy. I’m on a par with my grandma.

If an idea won’t fade from your mind, it generally needs acting on. So we took the plunge. You’re supposed to do radical and ludicrous things in your youth, and we chose the most risky thing we could conceive.

Having support back stage, that is crucial. A few days before the appointed birth day, Ben got the flu and collapsed twice in the kitchen. This was a huge concern for us, as we knew he wouldn’t be allowed in surgery or Special Care Nursery with the flu. He took time off work, and our parents cooked so many soups and dishes that we were both able to rest and recover. Our lawns were done, twice, our dog cared for beautifully. Mum sat with me for hours on hospital days, and drove me around. We should probably have asked for support earlier in the horror that was my first trimester, but when we did, it was there. When we had our daughter, between our church family and our blood family, Ben didn’t have to cook for over 5 weeks. It was astounding. My private midwife visited and messaged me till I felt confident. There were so many valuable pieces in our support puzzle.

Harder is the lovely tradition of visiting new babies. It’s theoretically really nice. I simultaneously wanted it and couldn’t handle much of it. There is a real irony that you have insufficient energy for visitors at the best of times, and then at the worst of times, surgery and newborn, you have more visitors than ever before. Your gate keeping skills need to be honed before, or rapidly honed during, because otherwise there will be an extra sick, very teary mother. It’s ideal to share new baby cuddles, but when life is not ideal, something’s got to give. I wish more people could have enjoyed her newness but Mr. Baruch was onto something when he said that ‘the ones who mind don’t matter, and the ones who matter don’t mind’.

While I was pregnant, our main concern was how we were going to keep a tiny person cared for at night. We decided that flexibility was our strategy, we would do whatever worked. If we needed to co-sleep, we would do that. If she needed to be formula fed so that our mum’s could do night shifts, we would do that. Our night regime evolved after I developed vertigo. We were the couple who had never spent a night apart since we got married, but we found that if Ben sleeps out with her and brings her in for a feed, I have the strength to care for her during the day. He deals with grunts, re-settling, and checks for actual hunger, so that my role is milk-and-milk-alone. At first he started on the couch, and then we resigned ourselves to the regime and borrowed a mattress. It’s kind of sad, but it’s also kind of awesome that as a team, we have a breastfed baby girl, a mama able to care for her during the day, and a papa young enough to be able to cope with work too.

Would life be easier for me if she were bottle fed? Yes. It’s a hugely personal decision for sick mamas. But as with all decisions, mine came from the journey I have been on, a journey of sickness. I don’t feed in spite of my illness, I feed because of it. I longed to give her the gift of breastmilk. It’s the earliest gift of health that I can bestow, my body has made plenty of it, and so we are prioritising it. I have unresolved feeding pain, but that’s another story.

In the day time, I am grateful for a baby who sleeps. I lie down for all her sleeps, three or so hours a day. If she didn’t sleep and did cry, I would need her grandmas to let me get a daily sleep. But our quiet life, it works best for the two of us. No there aren’t many outings yet, but that’s ok. I’ve been mostly homebound without a baby too, and this is 100% better. When she’s older and drinks less milk, she might go to her grandmother’s houses for plays like her namesake book, ‘Marigold in Grandmother’s House’. She might sleep through too, breastfeed less, and I might start to feel better again. We were given a placid little girl, sparkly, but not fussy* or teary. That’s the best gift you can be given when you’re underpowered.

It has been extremely physically challenging despite flexibility and support, but emotionally, there aren’t words for how grateful we are to have Aurelia in our world. That leap, it hurt like nothing else, but it also took our lives up numerous notches on the joy scale. There is more laughing, singing, goofiness and hugging in our home than ever, groans followed by euphoria, and fulfilled sighs at the end of the day. Worth the risk, and a season (or eight) of extra-ill.

* She was not fussy for the first few months, and then immediately after I penned those words she took up five-month-old extensive grizzling and all day demands, I suppose because she is too grown up and bored for quiet lying and happy bouncing anymore. Sparkly and fussy. 

Pregnancy Diaries, Vol. VI

Thirty weeks.

I think it’s time we that we all came out and admitted that I am not actually going to have a baby, because, am I? It was very magical, and sickening, and exciting, and la di dah ‘I’m having a baby whooooo so pumped, this feels so right, cannot wait’. And now it’s all very ‘what the hell, how on earth did I get myself in this ridiculous situation?’ It’s just all very well to be five weeks pregnant  and stoked that you made a baby, and twenty weeks pregnant,  partying that you’re half done but glad it’s a cute lifetime away. And then thirty weeks arrives and you’re waddling down the street being kicked in your cervix and holding your uterus up and wishing you’d invested in a pair of pants that actually fits your new fat deposits curves, and it dawns on you that you must have been in a deluded state for months on end to have been so unalarmed by the upcoming event.

It’s a familiar feeling, this ‘I was obviously in a coma, because how in my right mind did I get here?’ That was me the day before I made the best decision of my life, to marry Ben. It was fun being engaged, and not-terrified, and so extraordinarily sure inside, and then the night before, booom. I’M PROMISING TO LIVE WITH HIM FOREVER AND OBVIOUSLY I WAS UNCONCIOUS OUR WHOLE RELATIONSHIP BECAUSE I GOT HERE AND ITS MAD.  

I find myself in a very neurotic state of affairs. I’m madly nesting, attending birth classes, attesting to the fact that I cannot wait to meet our daughter, while simultaneously feeling a sense of being 20 hours into a flight to a foreign country with no return ticket, and no idea why I booked in the first place. I remember feeling that on my way to Paris, just as we left Heathrow airport, and suddenly there was only one hour till I was meant to be speaking my woeful highschool French, and living with a foreign family. At that moment, I was like ‘Wow. I totally got caught up in this, and I’m only just come to my senses now one hour before we arrive, which is a point of no return, which is unfortunate for me, and MERDE!’

I’m now looking forward to not being pregnant because I’m uncomfortable and absolutely exhausted, and every single time I verbalise this thought to Ben {which is a lot of times}, I remember OH, but not being pregnant means that baby has come out and I’m caring for it. OH. OK. Maybe I should just stay pregnant after all. OH. But you can’t stay pregnant; you have to have the baby. RIGHT. I see how it is.

And these thoughts have almost nothing to do with the uncertainty of whether I will be caring for a special needs child or not, they’re just part of ice-cold-feet-syndrome.   

I will always remember my Dad’s words to me the night before I got married. He said, “No, you have thought this through extensively. This feeling isn’t a sign that you’ve been unconsciously swept up for a couple of years Dee, it’s a sign that you understand the gravity of what you’re doing.”

And he was right. I was so acutely aware of the enormity of my decision, that I was momentarily overcome. Momentarily sitting with a concept which was too large to hold, and ready and needing to embark and live in the far-less-frightening daily reality. There is a time for thinking, and there are some thoughts which need to move into action or paralysis will ensue.

That knowledge makes my current thoughts sound more bi-polar, or can we describe them as balanced?

I am overcome by disbelief that I am on the brink of becoming a mother so soon, and simultaneously completely sure that it will be a no-regret situation. I believe in tandem feelings, in hormonal laugh-turn-crying, and never-been-so-happy-or-so-sad days. 

The uncomfortable complexity I feel is deliciously reminiscent of being on the brink of the best journeys I have ever been on.  

high on life and blood

Happy endorphins float through my body on and off all day and night.

This sense of joyful mental well-being has never been as consistent in my life as the last few months.  Even though I projectile vomited my breakfast this morning, even though I can’t sleep through the night, even though I grieve on the couch with Ben when we mentally prepare to go to the Royal Women’s for brain checkups.

It’s a three stranded cord, this joy.

Being on the brink of something new, after the longest, dreariest, waiting season of my life.

The magic of feeling a tiny human move within me all day long.

And something most people usually have: blood flowing.

These years with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome have been faint, weak, powerless. I’ve been living half strength, like a watery apology of a cup of hot chocolate. Full bodied, full creamed, or shall I write normal....I lost the memory of what that felt like. I knew my autonomic system was dysfunctional, I could rattle off my wordy diagnosis, but I couldn’t recall how I was supposed to feel. I wondered sometimes if I was a hypochondriac. How much of my inability to do things was physical, and how much was mental? I wondered if my aversion to hanging out the washing and cleaning the shower was more laziness than chronically low blood pressure. I wondered if my default position of asking Ben to bring something to the couch for me was a deep growing slothfulness.

And then my blood volume increased in the second trimester, because I was growing a baby. Standing up, the most taken for granted of abilities, became easy. There is no blackness, no crouching to the ground as I wait for blood to reach my head. I lift my arms up to the washing line, and I don’t feel like I am ebbing away. I took my first bath in four years, and I didn’t start to pass out, so I started to take them multiple times a week, for the joy of it. I don’t do intense cardio, and yet I can still stand and walk. I go and buy the groceries for the first time in years, because I can stand in a queue, I can stand in fluorescent lights. The blood doesn’t drain from my organs, leaving me a quickly wasting shell.

The lady at the checkout saw the load I was carrying, and presumably my baby bump, and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you standing there with all that stuff. You can just put in on the counter while you wait.” I am grateful for the kindness of strangers to me while I’m pregnant, but the cruelty of invisible illness is acute. The bump I have out the front, which induces the compassion of society, it is no trouble to me. I have been far far sicker while not pregnant; while standing there slim and normal to the eye, no offers of seats or help. Because no one can tell that my blood had settled in my legs and my head is light. No one can see that I feel like lukewarm and woefully weak tea, that I am silently disabled and there is nothing I can do about it.

I want to bottle this blood, to feel like this always. Blood is a life spring, invisible and essential. I don’t know how long it will last after I give birth, or when I will return to my watery, strengthless, invisible reality. I don’t want to go back there, to live grey and drained. I don’t have the words to describe the bleakness of the normality I am on vacation from. All I can think is, if you can stand unsupported and not crumple like a paper bag, life is sweeter than you know.

For now, that is me. The life I’m growing inside me is also giving me life. 

So much icing on the cake. 

Pregnancy Diaries, Vol. V

Hey little girl, I have loved the last few months with you in my womb. My love for you is fierce, so fierce.

Last time I wrote I said that I was proud of you just for wiggling your legs and arms. I’d been delighting in your very being, unconditional of achievement, and when I wrote those words, my foreboding intuitive brain asked me this question: I wonder if I will learn something in our upcoming tests which tells me this is all you will do, and this unconditional love will be heavily necessary?

And then they told me it was possible your days wouldn’t unfold normally and you wouldn’t do all the things with your arms and legs that I’d pictured. My head throbbed when they offered to take you away. In my shock, I soon recalled my last blog words, that I loved you just because you were alive.

The day they told me there was something abnormal on your brain, I felt gutted when you kicked me. You were so innocent and sweet as you exercised and experimented in there, perfectly naive to the words that had assaulted us that day. I wanted your kicks to be the expression of a perfectly forming baby, but every wiggle reminded me that maybe things were tainted. How wrong it seemed that you were wiggling so joyfully, while I was grieving.  

I felt desperately sad that maybe my joy had been kidnapped and tainted. How unfair to have the magic stolen, to think of your life with such heaviness. I just wanted to smile when I felt your aliveness, and treasure my bump, and dream about your life, and love you just as much.

My wish and prayer were answered two days later. Since that day, I feel your kicks not as a tragic reminder from a naive baby that something may be wrong, but as a poignant sign that you are alive, and forming, and beautiful, and mine.

I forget about your diagnosis often. The other day Ben and I were planning to take you to an orchestral concert when you’re about four, so that you could choose an instrument, if you wanted to play one. Only later did I remember that perhaps you wouldn’t have the motor skills. Sometimes I’m talking about you, and then someone brings up the test findings, and I realise that I had completely forgotten and was rambling on about kicking and bump growing with excitement. Those moments are my favourite, because then you are just my baby who is a joy to carry; not in a box, not a cause for grief, not so different from any other.

I'm so glad it's only maybe, but even if it was definitely, it would be fine. You will be exactly the way you’re meant to be, and we will learn from you exactly what we need to learn. As long as you wiggle, we will love.

Pregnancy Diaries, Vol. IV

Another week chained to the couch, because the council of Never Ending Sickness came together and agreed that waning nausea and vomiting should be met with frightening colds and sinus pain. To their credit, they allowed me one day where I was in good health between ailments, with the sun shining, and I nearly died of happiness.

But between scorching my face from obsessive steam inhalation, retching with each cough because my gag reflex has been weakened, and sitting on the floor drooling over the ‘do not take while pregnant’ cold medicines, there has been one anti-misery potion.

Buggle.  

In all my years, I have never been one to lie awake at 3am laughing. I don’t do humour at ungodly hours.

But every night, I wake up at three on the dot to a mad womb party of kicks, flips, whooshes and wriggles. The enthusiasm of this little human to dance in the early hours, after demanding womb service in the form of toast-with-vegemite, is delightful. And if Ben is groggily awake, I drag his hand to my stomach, where it spends more time than ever before. When we wake for the day at 7.30, I enjoy another half hour workout, to make sure I will never ever leave the bed in a bad mood. My little friend seems to enjoy Beethoven in the car, and I make sure to sing so that extra vibrations reach it’s cocoon.

The only thing I know about this baby is that it moves, and that is enough for mad love. I’m usually so much more picky with love dispensation, but here I taste a strange unconditional version.

All the parents are posting pictures of their children like ‘Joe got student of the week!!’ ‘Betty got distinction in her ballet exam!!’, and I’m like,

'My baby has arms and legs, and moves them.'

Pride and joy. 

Pregnancy Diaries, Vol. III

I have read many letters to mums-to-be, and I’ve decided to stop.

They are shared on social media frequently, they are our society being honest and vulnerable about a transformative time in a woman’s life. They begin the same way, “you think that it’s going to be all love and snuggles when your baby arrives, and I’m here to tell you what I wish I’d been told.”

And then they share about the darkness of the earliest weeks, the parts that rocked them to their core, the bits they never expected. They let those of us exepecting oxytocin and bliss in on the truth which is never spoken about.

Except, it’s the truth I’ve heard a hundred times. A hundred scary times.

I will become shell of my former self, I will feel scared, and lonely, and pathetic. I’ll be breastfeeding in agony, and I will sob every hour. I will bleed, my baby will cry for hours, and I will not shower for days. I won’t sleep, and I will move through my days as a zombie, until a few months later I will emerge and climb into a sweeter rhythm.

I don’t discount a letter they write. I feel the honesty pouring off the page. I will probably write posts just as raw, emulating these cries of suffering, in five months times.

But I won’t write them especially for expectant mums. Because expectant mums are already expecting exactly that.

Ben was ready to take the plunge into parenthood, while I was stuck on just how lowly it sounded. I have felt the cruelty of insomnia, the daze of the following day. The loneliness of depression, the inability to leave the house. The struggle to take a shower, the pain that doesn’t resolve quickly. I was instructed there is nothing you can do to prepare, and so the information seemed to flood me with foreboding. I battled for 365 days straight over the question of whether I should dare to voluntarily go to this dark place. I was chewed up and spat out by my desire to mother and my realism about what was coming.

The letters do end with a beautiful promise that the love for the baby is overpowering and like nothing you can imagine. The trouble is that the only bit of the letter you can relate to from past experience is the suffering, because you can’t fathom that depth of love. So the suffering remains in your mind. You’re still left scared.

Occasionally I wondered if the warnings are like the marriage ones we received – how bad the first five years would be. I mused: is it remotely possible that motherhood could be like the last 4.5 years married to Ben, a blatant contrast to society’s predictions of doom?

On this one, I’m inclined to believe it may be as challenging as I’ve heard.

I am grateful that when the time comes that I have a newborn, and I am struggling to float, I will not feel as though I am experiencing lows uncommon to womankind. I will cling to the stories that the pain is normal, the pain is not forever.

But I wonder if the information could be shared not as early warning, but in a season of empathy. At the right time, these words will be a balm. 

We are warned of the agony of labour, the misery of early motherhood, the tiredness that will unhinge us, the expense of children, the end of freedom, the strain on our marriage. And we’re warned before hand, when there is nothing we can do but open ours eye wide in fright, or run the other way. We’re warned before the times when the information is a comforting ‘ah, you too’, and after the biological desire to reproduce has heavily hit us.

After all the warning, we are frightened. So encourage us.  

When we are drowning, then share how you were too, and how you swam to shore.

Pregnancy Diaries, Vol. II

Taking bebe to ballet at 13 weeks 

In the hardest part of my pregnancy, I read on Instagram about friends who ‘loved being pregnant.’

I could think of a lot of words for my pregnancy, but ‘like’ and ‘love’ hadn’t made the list. Even ‘tolerate’ was going too far.

Vile, soul crushing, unbearable, unrepeatable, those were my words.

It felt profoundly unfair that some have the best time of their lives, while others want to take their lives, all in the exact same process. Why did some luck out so badly, I wanted to know, just as I wanted to know all those years ago why I got chronic fatigue syndrome and Tom, Dick and Harry didn’t.

I knew I would never be able to speak of my pregnancy so flippantly. You can love your baby and hate your pregnancy, I told myself. I told Ben. I told my baby.

Two weeks later, I’m in bed with Ben at 7.30 pm, settling in for a good twelve hours of sleep, gushing over how much I’m enjoying being pregnant. I’m all cosy and happy, and tonight there is no puke on my lips, no smell of disinfectant drifting from the bathroom.

It hits me that I have now stood on both sides, having felt the desolation of sickness, and the ecstasy of being pregnant. In short pockets I would do anything to lengthen, the mystery of ‘loving being pregnant’ has been revealed to me - the women who express this sentiment no longer smug aliens with whom I could never converse. I think I know what exactly they are referring to. I think I have figured out what ‘enjoying your pregnancy’ means.

I love the knowledge, the warm thought which swims in my mind all day: there’s someone else inside me. The reality that my stodgy heartbeat is not the only one, but there is a smaller faster one pattering several times for each of mine. Maybe they’re sucking their thumb, or swimming, or sleeping, cocooned in my womb. Occasionally, it flashes into my mind that having a baby growing in me is the most bizarre sci-fi concept I’ve ever heard. I imagine too many times the moment I will pull my baby up onto my chest and finally hug it and kiss it. I am embarrassingly addicted to knowing which fruit corresponds with the size of my baby. If I don’t like the fruit that one website suggests (as in, I don’t think it sounds big enough) I will select another website which compares my baby to a larger fruit. Half way through the week (more accurately, two days in), I check what fruit it will be the following week.  It’s a lemon this week. Next week it will be an apple. I know, so big! 

I take pride in my belly, even though it has laid off 90% of my wardrobe. I’ve never been curvy, I have been angular, and I love my first-time roundness. I relish the early arrival of my bump, because there was nowhere for it to hide. I do side-on views for Ben every single night, and he has to say it’s grown, and he can’t suggest that it’s bloating, or else. One friend says it now looks like I’ve actually drunk a glass of water. I’m glad my pudge has not gone unnoticed. I put a cushion up my top the other day to show Ben what I might look like in a few months; I wanted him to understand that I will not be able to see my toes. The shape was off, and I permanently stretched my top during the demo, but it was good preparation and we could not stop laughing.

The other day I got home from an opp shopping trip with my Mum and sister, our holiday tradition. Leaving the house still fills me with joy, it’s a big event. When I got home from this trip, I was completely exhausted and made a vow not to wear boots with heels next time. My back hurt, my head hurt, my uterus hurt, and I lay on the couch under my blanket. I lay there in this cloud of bliss legitimacy: I am pregnant, I have full right to lie here for two hours with my heatpack. Long ago I had to get used to the concept of rest and relaxation for all humans, even my invincible self, but there is something extra validating about ‘being with child’ and knowing that you must rest. Somehow nurturing a child means that I am nurturing myself, with even less inward reprimand than before.

We were watching the news, a rare occurrence for us. At the end, there was a story of a man suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after his time serving in the Middle East. He wrote a children’s book, for his daughter and all other young ones who need to grasp why their fathers are not the same as they were. The last page went something like this, “Whatever happens, families stick together, and love each other.” Nothing new or extraordinary in those words, but I had tears streaming down my face and Ben was bemused. I have become a marshmallow of sentiment, crying when I see pictures of a stranger’s newborn, sobbing when I read birth stories, even before the baby has emerged. Everything-is-just-so-sweet-and-sad-I’m-going-to-cry.

If it’s a bliss-and-beautiful hour, I love it. I let myself feel deliriously happy, and savour each second of feeling well. Those times are some of the best of my life.

And when I’m stuck in the midst of an eternal day, with my endless gastro, and externally achievement-free existence, I don’t even try for glowing. I sit in the mud and nearly survive.

I have this premonition that having a baby is going to be a lot like this.

 It’s going to be giddy highs of extreme love, and soggy trench-like lows, probably all in the same day. So maybe its good the roller coaster is in motion, and I’m soaring and retching, and existing all the time. And I have zero regrets. 

Pregnancy Diaries, Vol. I

In just one week, the first trimester pain has begun to ebb away. As it fades, the memory of misery decays along with it. The heartbeat seems to erase the struggle, and there is smiling, and brunch with Ben, and excitement - giddier than when we first found out. But below is the reality of the first.

first the worst

second the best

third the golden eagle

When we found out that I was pregnant, we were elated. We’d didn’t take falling pregnant easily for granted. We were giddy with amazement. We were terrified. There was a poppy seed child growing within. It was a mixture of us – we hoped the best genes had been picked, that it wouldn’t be a red haired boy with acne and severe eye problems, likely to be bullied. We prayed for less superficial things too.  It was all happy, miracle, wow, is-this-real?

Two days later it was all ewww, need nachos, this-is-ugly. Lucky we had felt such high levels of joy on finding out and crammed them into one ecstatic day, because they weren’t to last.

I had always suspected that pregnancy cravings were a socially acceptable notion formed by expectant women who wanted an excuse to indulge. I thought pregnant women got away with lax diets because pregnancy had become a permissive ‘eating for two’ state. I thought they couldn’t complain about baby weight if they’d given into cravings in pregnancy. I was going to exercise and eat healthily throughout the whole thing, and enjoy returning to size six in due course. Preferably by the time I left the birth centre.

Soon, I would slump to the pantry in the morning. Opening the doors and staring at offensive foods like rice, tuna, chocolate and weetbix would cause me to dry retch. Seeing food, imagining food, even former favourites, made me queasy and depressed. Posts of food on social media were my undoing. My impeccable gluten, fructose and dairy free diet collapsed overnight, after years of self discipline. I was too sick and tired to care. I sat on the couch with Ben’s box of cereal, stuffing my fist in and pulling out sugared flakes. Some days I ate an entire pack of corn chips for breakfast. One week it was noodles for all meals, then mashed potatoes, and then toast with vegemite. Whatever pleased me one week was nauseating to me the next.

The next week I began to vomit. The first time was when I opened the fridge, to get the butter for my mashed potatoes. It was the sight of the cherry tomatoes sitting on the top shelf, all perky and red. I would fight the urge to vomit all day, and all evening long. Hurling is the thing I hate most in life, I abhor the experience. I blocked my nose when Ben walked in the room after preparing food. I lay most of the day on the couch, dozing, stomach churning, incapacitated. When I had to move to another room, I did so with my body doubled over, because of the faintness. By late morning I would cry, because I couldn’t endure it and I had to endure it. I daydreamed of a drug induced coma, unconsciousness more powerful than sleep. I was afraid to wake up in the morning to my deeply lonely, couch bound, vomiting existence.

One morning I decided to make a brave trip down the road to the supermarket. I knew the gentle stroll in the sunshine would be good for my low spirits. I entered the supermarket, and was assaulted by the food, packaged, yet still offensive. I went to find what I needed, and realised that I was feeling increasingly bad. I didn’t really want to buy anything after all; I just wanted to get outside. Once outside the shop, the nausea started to rise up my oesophagus. I began to self-counsel. Breathe, it’s ok, you can control this. You’re not going to throw up. I saw a seat outside a cafe – could I sit there without buying something? My rule-abiding temperament said no so I kept walking.

Oh no, and it then it began: the heaving, and the sweating from trying not to heave. In an instant it had risen to the top. There was no return. I rushed my hands to cup my mouth and threw up into them. I dashed to the closed rubbish bin, and let it slide off my hands into the bin. My hands and cheeks were splattered, and I had no tissues. With bystanders unashamedly staring, I used my clean arm to wipe the vomit away, and I was shaking and teary. I felt like the lowliest hung-over woman that ever lived.

I had thrown up just outside Gloria Jeans, and there was a lady trying to enjoy her morning coffee while riveted by my display. She asked if I was ok, and if I needed to get to the doctor. While repeatedly retching with my hands over my mouth, I told her that I was just pregnant and she commented that I shouldn’t have gone out. Well, yes. After throwing up in one more bin, and being rudely asked for the time by a male with no idea of the personal crisis and shame I was facing, I made it to the toilets, and sat in the cubicle cleaning up with toilet paper. That was the last time I left the house without a throw-bag and tissues.

I realised that cravings weren’t so much indulgence, but an instinct to stay alive. Food was required for life, and if there was any food I could tolerate, that was the food I would eat. I have never thought about food so often. I thought about vomiting it up, and I salivated for all kinds of things that I have been an advocate against. After eating, I felt my oesophagus burn with gastric acid and wondered whether the heartburn tablet I just popped would harm the baby, as the packet clearly suggested.

In Week 6 I was struggling to zip up my black skinny jeans. I thought this was a little premature given my child was sesame seed sized. In reality it was my constipation, bloating, and sudden carb overload, masquerading as four months pregnant. We wanted to take a ‘before the bump’ picture in my first month, but that day never came. There was no more flat stomach.

The fatigue was like a heavy blanket, crushing and debilitating. I slept before lunch, and after lunch, and was held at gunpoint in my dreams. I woke drenched, worrying I’d miscarried. It was like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome on steroids, with the stomach bug twenty four hours a day. I dropped all the balls, and when Ben got home from work, he picked up armfuls. He cooked the one thing I wanted, shopped for my desires, cleaned, washed, and hugged me. Our poor puppy got walked half as often because we were drowning. I was googling cleaning help, and Light ‘n Easy meal delivery, and grocery delivery, and dog walkers.

I had no glow, no ultrasound picture, no energy, and a noticeable constipated bump. There was nothing glamorous about this experience, no, it was the hardest of my twenty five years.  I know this sounds incredibly melodramatic, because I wasn’t dying, rather, I was giving life. All I can say is that 24/7 nausea is demoralising. There was guilt that I was experiencing something many dream of and are denied, and feeling so miserable. I worried the baby would sense I didn’t love it and wouldn’t stick, because I felt wretched. And wasn’t pregnancy meant to be the calm before the newborn storm, and if we were drowning now then what? The pregnancies I’d observed were beyond the 1^st trimester, they were in films, they were excited, and they were couples looking adorable on outings, women in curve hugging dresses. I’d never seen someone hobble around with a bucket, wondering if they were the weakest woman on earth for detesting every passing hour.

The worst thing was demanding a feeling of joy, yet struggling to even make it to the end of the day. I was forcing an emotion that was rightly in hibernation, and feeling guilt that I could not properly awaken it.

How do your reconcile joy and pain, and let them exist side by side? How do you tell people the most miraculous thing is coming to be, and you’ve never been more physically oppressed? How many times can you tell a friend that you are not really ok, and expect them to care? It has been the hardest time, but I believe it will lead to good times.

Right now it is bitter but it will be sweeter than I can comprehend. I’ve never met a woman who didn’t think it was worth it. I trust the truth of a million women who have walked this road, and vowed that when I first hold our baby on my chest, I will see this time as the smallest price to pay for something so precious.  

A hundred thankyous to the women in my life who sent me messages, meals, gifts, beautiful flowers, and quotes. This experience has brought me to my knees, and I have never wanted out more, so thankyou for keeping me in.