Pregnancy is mostly fine

I don't, like, love it, but it's pretty normal

I am ~7 months pregnant and my review so far is: it’s fine. Pretty regular.

If you have considered becoming pregnant and are of approximately of the life stage to do so, you may have been consuming Pregnancy Content Online. You may therefore have seen a large number of very horrible stories. Women posting about throwing up nonstop for months, or becoming so fatigued that they can’t work or live their lives at all, or undergoing profound unwanted psychological changes and feeling like entirely different people afterwards.

I’m not saying that if you become pregnant that this is guaranteed to not happen to you. But I am saying that it probably won’t, and you’re likelier to have a pregnancy like mine.

People who had an awful time being pregnant are a lot likelier to post about it, so you’re a lot likelier to hear about awful pregnancies. Also, posting about having an easy time can come off as bragging, which is gauche. But I’m not in the mommysphere; almost all my friends and acquaintances are childless; I’m the first in my immediate social cohort to have kids.

So public service announcement: pregnancy can be fine!

I don’t love being pregnant.¹ I don’t feel any profound alignment with my feminine purpose or whatever the hell. Some elements of this experience so far have been annoying and unpleasant, but I feel approximately normal most of the time, and the stuff I was really afraid of ended up not happening.

First trimester was fine

I’ve heard people talking about the first trimester and the last month being the worst part of pregnancy. I haven’t hit the last month yet, but I can report that my first trimester was fine.

I had zero nausea, at least as long as I wasn’t trying to choke down one of those enormous prenatal horse pills that mostly contain supplements that you don’t even really need.² You might have gotten the impression from the online pregnant lady postvortex that basically all pregnant women throw up continuously for months, and that does happen—hyperemesis gravidarum affects 0.3-3% of pregnancies—but you’re much likelier to have zero nausea at all. 20% of pregnant women do. 20% isn’t bad! That’s 1 in 5! That’s Donald Trump’s chances in 2016! And of the 80% who do have some nausea, less than half will ever get to the point of throwing up, and then only at the absolute peak of first-trimester nausea.

I also had an okay time with fatigue. My energy levels remained normal most of the time and I had no problem keeping up my normal activities, which are generally quite intense. About once a week or so I would have a day where a two-hour outing would wipe me out, and I would really want to go home and couchrot for a while, but that was the worst of it. It seems like for plenty of people, this is just what their baseline existence is like.

The worst part of first trimester was the nipple pain. This could get intense! I would rate the pain as being of similar intensity to a bad period cramp, in your nipple. It would get triggered by either sex³ or cold weather, last about 20 minutes, and it stopped happening after about 3 weeks.

I also got, like, stupid horny, and that was fun.

My brain seems to be fine

The other thing I was worried about was cognitive and emotional changes. I had heard reports of women becoming really neurotic after becoming pregnant, because of “mom brain” or evolutionary psychology or whatever the hell.

Well, not me. My baseline personality is aggressive, confident, risk-tolerant, and not remotely anxious, and it still is that way. If this pregnancy has made anybody more anxious and neurotic, it’s my husband.

Maybe pregnancy installs brand new previously-nonexistent neuroticism in some people, but I suspect that this has more to do with how neurotic you are to begin with. If you’re an anxious person, you’ll probably be anxious about the pregnancy, and about the kid, too.⁴ And if you’re not, you’ll probably stay that way.

I did have a brief period very early on in first trimester where the hormones did seem to make me more emotionally unstable, in a way that felt potentially exogenous—in much the same way that being drunk feels exogenous. However, this experience is confounded by the fact that I got dumped over text message at five weeks by somebody who had previously communicated an intention to help me create and raise children, so it’s not obvious that all the hysterics from around that time were really related to the hormones. Finding out whether or not that vague sense of exogeneity around weeks 4-6 was genuine will have to wait for the second kid, so if anybody breaks up with me again next time I will be really annoyed.⁵

I am significantly more prone to crying, but it feels like a distinctly physiological change rather than an emotional change. This seems congruent with trans people’s reports of going on hormones and experiencing a sharp change in their tendency or ability to cry—or with some of my cis male friends who report suddenly becoming unable to cry after puberty, despite feeling all the same emotions.

Third trimester “pregnancy brain” has so far not affected me either, or if it has, it must have been extremely early onset. If anything, I will miss having the convenient excuse of pregnancy brain every time I trail off absently in the middle of a sentence or forget what a power strip is called.

(Mostly) quitting substances was fine

I am a huge believer in better living through chemistry. My threshold for taking a pill of some kind to alleviate an unpleasant sensation is quite low. I’m also a fairly heavy drinker. I wouldn’t often drink to serious drunkenness but I would typically have 1-2 drinks a day on a weekday (for evening sensory regulation and relaxation), and 3-4 would not be unusual on a weekend outing (for fun). I was really, really not looking forward to having to quit all that stuff.

But actually it was fine? After about a month I mostly lost the urge to drink and replaced beer with soda. Also, it turns out a lot of medications are pregnancy safe and you only have to avoid some of them (i.e. ibuprofen/NSAIDS⁶), a lot of what you need to avoid only applies to first trimester (i.e. oral psuedophedrine), and I didn’t have to stop taking Adderall at all.

The bad stuff is mostly just silly

I am not immune to pregnancy symptoms. In the spirit of defeating the pepperoni airplane I will list them.

• Late in first trimester I got extremely prone to bloating and had to carry a holster of Beano around. Bloating also lead to lower back pain. I had back pain to begin with though so this was not a huge shift.

• For a while I had boob acne

• In the winter when my skin was dry, my titties got really itchy. I was finally forced to pick up an after-shower moisturizing habit, which I resented. I am simply not a Moisturizer. It isn’t my nature. I went back to not doing it as soon as I could.

• Peeing is kind of weird now?

• Progesterone relaxes your smooth muscles, which means that basically all your sphincters lower their security protocols. The main effect of this is that I get acid reflux at night now, which means that now I get to really commiserate with my husband who has GERD. The only effective treatment I have found for this is ice cream before bed. Yes, really.

• My clothes stopped fitting the way you fall in love—slowly, and then all at once.

  I discovered this while attending a conference at 5 months. The morning of my first committee meeting I took out one of my default Professional Outfits—high-waisted slacks and a button-up shirt—and quickly realized that I had a problem. Sometimes this was fun, though—dresses that previously looked staid and traditional on me now look delightfully slutty.

• I can’t bring my knees up to my chest anymore, so I have to put on socks in a myriad of really stupid ways.

• My range of motion is definitely restricted now. I am no longer particularly gainly. I can neither confirm nor deny being caught waddling.

• My feet start hurting pretty quick these days and they’re prone to swelling. I take off my shoes a lot and I love sitting down. Boy I really fucking love sitting down!

• Sleep is kind of annoying. I have a special pregnant lady dog bed⁷ for lying on my side or stomach, which is a fun thing to casually mention to people. Ah, yes, the special pregnant lady dog bed, we’ve all seen it.

This stuff is tedious, annoying, and silly. I’m definitely moderately disabled at this point.

But it’s not life-ruining; I don’t feel miserable. I complain about the bad stuff because it’s kind of funny, and because it’s a set of novel experiences I’m having—but while I’m sitting down at my desk⁸ doing my computer job, it’s pretty easy to forget about.

There are other dimensions to pregnancy, both phenomenological and social, that I’ll write about later. But on a purely physiological level, it’s fine. If you want kids and are really dreading pregnancy, consider relaxing—it’ll probably be fine.

1. Certain life circumstances have made this pregnancy an unusually difficult time for me, but I’m factoring that out, and speaking about the baseline physiological experience itself, which generalizes better.

2. Seriously, why did my obgyn suggest these? What about my delicate 5-foot frame and lesbian haircut suggested that I had fully trained myself out of a gag reflex?

3. I have no idea why this happened. Something something blood flow?

4. This seems to be the pattern with postpartum mental illness too—the single biggest risk factors for postpartum depression/anxiety is being prone to depression/anxiety to begin with.

5. I do not recommend having your polycule explode right after getting pregnant. If you can at all avoid this I urge it in the strongest possible terms. This has been really really hard! And messy and ugly and bad! And still is, frankly! But it would have been that way whether I was pregnant or not, so I am setting that aside for this post.

6. Protip: acetaminophen/Tylenol actually works just as well, but you have to take a whole gram of it at a time, two extra-strength Tylenols at once. You will surely not regret taking an entire gram of Tylenol at once.

7. Technically it is supposed to be for the baby but my mother-in-law gifted it to me and then clued me in that you can also just use it yourself and wow this thing is awesome.

8. Okay, couch