It's less than magical

Please allow me to just post this short rant about the discomforts this pregnancy is giving me. Yes, I am only 8 weeks along, but I have already declared (although maybe I don’t really really mean it) that I don’t want to do this again. Well, some say the first trimester is the hardest – excluding the labor and delivery, of course. So here’s a list of the things I hate about this period:

1. Morning sickness. Which is so incorrectly named because it doesn’t only happen in the mornings, it strikes at any time of the day or night! Argh! Believe me, there is absolutely nothing fun about a constantly queasy stomach, or that heavy feeling that something’s lodged in your chest, waiting to explode out of your throat. I have knelt in front of the toilet at home, in the office, and even in Moks’s office, with all my facial muscles shaking, my eyes crying, and my whole upper body convulsing as I hurl my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I really really wish that the morning sickness would stop when I reach the second trimester.

2. Nasal stuffiness. I’ve lost count of the many afternoons when I’m comfortably seated in my office, with the temperature neither too hot nor too cold, I’m rested and relaxed, and then suddenly it would be difficult to breathe. It feels like the insides of my nose is completely covered in snot, and I would go to the bathroom to check and find that there is nothing there. It’s clean. But somehow it’s hard to breathe, as if the lining of my nasal cavity thickened motu proprio. Pregnancy books and websites say this is normal, but that does not make it less uncomfortable. Annoying.

3. I’m getting uglier by the day! Waaaah! I noticed I’m starting to have that line in the center of my abdomen, and I’m worried that it’s only a matter of time before my neck, armpits – even my singit! – gets darker.

4. I’m being paranoid about everything! I’m really wondering if ignorance is bliss in pregnancy. Because so far, all my research about everything that can go wrong in this pregnancy is just making me worry. From the most mundane concerns like, my hair will become very dry, I might have chloasma, my feet will swell and I won’t be able to fit in my shoes, to the serious possibilities like Down’s syndrome, cleft lip and palate, gestational diabetes, sickle cell disease, etc. – the more I learn about these things the more I get freaked out. But I can’t stop researching and reading up! I need to always remind myself of my friend Charis’s advice – to just raise everything up in prayer, because there’s not much else I can do anyway.

So there, these are the main reasons why this period is not all magical for me. I’m sure Moks can add a couple more to this list (e.g. how he has to do all the housework now, or how he has to get me whatever I want from downstairs when I’m already in bed, or how I have soooooo little patience now for Delamar’s whining) but I think I’ll just wait for him to post about that.