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Musings

16th Jul 2022

I love my kids more than anything but I hated how I felt during pregnancy

Melissa Carton

I think one of the most accurate portrayals of pregnancy was Phoebe in Friends.

The scene where her friends compliment her on her pregnancy glow and she tells them that it’s not a glow, it’s sweat from throwing up all day was highly relatable.

I had so many people tell me I was glowing during my pregnancies. I felt far from glowing. I felt somewhere in between about to throw up and might possible faint street.

Don’t get me wrong I love my kids and I love being a parent but I would rather do childbirth twelve more times than do another nine months of being pregnant.

I was unlucky in that I had two fairly rough pregnancies. I’ve met several mums who said they sailed through their pregnancy with no morning sickness, no dizzy spells, nothing. This was not the case for me.

On my first pregnancy, I had morning sickness right up till the end. I couldn’t keep a thing down, sometimes even water. I had no energy and constant migraines from dehydration.

Looking back on it I should have gone to the hospital to be treated but it was my first pregnancy and I didn’t know any better. I just stuck to eating Rennies and hoping for the best.

Speaking of Rennie, oh my god the heartburn!

Even before I knew I was pregnant, I knew I was pregnant, because I suddenly went from never having had heartburn once in my life to having it constantly.

Everyone kept joking that it meant that I was going to have a hairy baby and it turned out to be true. My son arrived with a huge head of black hair.

When I was pregnant with my daughter my iron levels took a plummet. I love being able to get out and about but I could barely walk from my bedroom to the front door.

To make matters worse I was pregnant during the summer and there was a heat wave which made me even more light headed.

One day while collecting my son from school I popped into the post office to mail something and collapsed taking down a whole rack of stationary and envelopes with me.

During those nine months, I was dropping left right and centre and I ended up spending the last few weeks bedridden.

toilets

 

Even for women who get away without any morning sickness, there’s still the need to constantly have to leg it to the bathroom. Whenever I went out for food or to a gig during my pregnancy I would always try to get an aisle seat so I could dash to the loo if I needed to.

And then, of course, there’s the gorgeous waddle and the inability to do anything involving having to bend over.

I think the one really big thing that I didn’t enjoy about pregnancy was that I didn’t feel like myself. I was this crazy vomiting, fainting wreck who spent more time in the bathroom than out of it.

That all said I really do love being a parent but I’m not going to lie I did shout ‘get out’ at my bump when I went overdue. When the discussion regarding having more children has come up I’ve told my husband that I’ve no problem having more children, he just has to figure out a way to get himself pregnant because I’m not doing it again.