Well, here we are. Let's all breathe a sigh of relief for the end of 2020, a year of…a lot. Just, so much. And for us in our little house, just a little bit more. Turns out, I am pregnant. Like, for real.
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| Like, for real for real. |
That's right, Reader. There is a squatter inside me who is juuuust getting big enough to knock on the walls when I’m being too loud or eating too much kimchi or, super annoyingly, trying to get some sleep. I am what they politely call “showing” but not yet aggressively so, so I don’t so much look preggers as I just look fat.
I will not be laying off the cheese, however, because there seems to really be a bun in this oven and if I don’t consume enough calcium my inside-baby will steal my teeth. Inside-babies are greedy little free-loaders, it turns out, and will leach you dry if you don’t mind yourself.
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| Zagnut is the name of my inside-baby |
They are also freaky little alien lizard people for a while, which I think is quite awesome. We’re a little past
that stage now, but for a while Zagnut was a terrifying horror monster version of a sea horse and I think it’s pretty cool that vestigial tails and flipper hands are absolutely still a thing.
The websites do not think this is cool, and instead spend a lot of energy apparently convincing nervous mothers-to-be that inside those primordial flipper-baby fins, cutsie-wootsie little toesie-woesies are growing ready to receive their precious kissy-wissies from their momsy-womsy. They encourage you to think of your little reptilian nightmare-maker like something innocuous and
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| Let it be ok that some creepy-ass empanada-looking monkey business like this grows inside of you. |
I am not a fan of the websites. I do not like their tone.
This is probably in part related to the fact that I am into
gross stuff (migrating fish eyes = dope) but also I’m 40 for God's sake, and I don’t
need anyone to soft-hand the gross parts of pregnancy for me. Pregnancy is gross. It is gross, and weird, and uncomfortable,
and inconvenient, and that is okay.
It is ok that there is an alien growing
inside of me. It is ok that I resent
feeling low-level nauseous for the 400 years it feels like I have already been
pregnant and I’m not even halfway done. It
is ok that I am right now full of extra bones but they aren't for me, and wtf even is that.
I currently have 4 arms and 4 legs, and being a human
spider sometimes weirds me out-- because it is super weird. It is also pretty metal. I am allowed to be skeeved out and excited.
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| I have a major gd beef. |
Did you answer that a pea is .2 inches long? And a blueberry is 1/4 inch long, and a raspberry is 1/2 inch long? No, you didn’t. Because all of that is wrong, and even though you don’t obsessively measure your fruit and vegetables, you already know it is wrong. Objectively, measurably wrong.
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| You are choosing to lie to me at a very vulnerable time in my life and I hate you. |
What
if I asked you how big a strawberry was?
Would you laugh at the absurdity of the question because one carton of
strawberries has sizes ranging from “smaller than a raspberry” to “almost a
deck of cards” so how could there even be a right answer to that? Or would you
say “obviously the one size of a strawberry is 1.5 inches long, the size of an
11 week old inside-baby”? Guess which
one the websites assume you would answer.
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| Just a pic of some random crap I found in my kitchen after a whopping 3 minutes of looking for stuff that is actually an inch and a half long. |
My beef here is multifold. First of all, at the most basic level, this isn’t hard to get right. Capers are right there being .2 inches long, no need to pull their more robust cousins the pea into it—especially when a week later, you need a nonthreatening item of produce about the size of a gd pea. Why not just bump everyone up to the accurate measurement if you’re insisting on this weird food metaphor?? Not only is the chart wrong but it is obviously, easily-fixably wrong. It's insultingly lazy.
Which leads me to consider a couple of options, none of them good when I’m looking for a trustworthy guide on this exciting, terrifying journey to motherhood.
Is it possible that the people making these websites are so obsessed with their scientific, data driven pursuits that they have totally lost track of such mundane aspects of everyday life as what common foods look like?
Seems unlikely.
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| It is really not hard to do, see, even I can do it. |
Do they not know how to measure things? Are measurements somehow not a part of the research of pregnancy?? Is this some other kind of science that doesn’t rely on data or numbers or accuracy?
Not a comforting thought.
Or is it more likely that the authors of some of the most omnipresent
and well-referenced guides available to me for navigating this transformative,
mysterious process are willing to sacrifice accuracy—even basic, really easy to get
right accuracy—for some good old fashioned cuteness?
Like I said, I don’t like their tone. I am not their demographic. I would prefer cold, clinical, trustworthy facts plsthx. There are already way too many outdated, conflicting rules and recommendations out there and trying to identify good info is hard.
Figuring out how to keep yourself and your inside-baby safe and happy can be rough. The guidelines tend to change from country to country (wine or no wine?), from doctor to doctor (coffee or no coffee?), and from family to family (a lady once told me her kid had peanut allergies because she ate so much peanut butter when she was pregnant). |
| Listeria looks like a Dark Souls creature. |
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| Did you know that if you leave your huge sore sweaty titties in a sports bra for too long, your cleavage starts to smell like cheese? Pregnancy! I'm very good at it! |
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| Right now, someone somewhere is thinking it's ok to not have the full info on listeria because "you shouldn't want to eat at Jersey Mike's anyway; processed food is bad for the baby." |
