Welcome to Weenie World

Pregnancy is a very special time. From the first positive test to the first kick to the last labor pain, it is truly a unique and special period in a woman's life. This time of transcendence, of connection with every mother before us, this magical time of transformation and growth as we create life within ourselves... only an arrogant fool would even attempt to sum up this transformative experience in a few words. But if I had to try, I think I could distill it down to three words:

Weird. As. Hell.

Look, I am not one of those women who came into pregnancy with no idea what to expect, who was too busy chasing professional dreams to ever interact with kids. You know. Those "too cool" career feminists who have Master's degrees and whose main interaction with children is vague disinterest in other people's babies while scrolling through Facebook, but who then get pregnant and discover a deep interest in all causes child-related and a natural affinity for motherhood and a thousand deep, passionately-argued opinions about things they didn't give a crap about three months ago. 

If anything, I am the exact opposite of that. I came out of the womb with baby fever. I loved dolls growing up. Passionately. Any present at Christmas or birthday-time that was anything other than a doll was a disappointment. If no doll was available to me, though, that was no problem-- a truck or a ball or a cat could just as easily be a baby, and you could be sure that I'd be right there with a diaper and a band-aid to catch that firetruck's poop and bandage the soccer ball's boo-boo. I am the oldest of four siblings, and I loved taking care of my baby siblings. In fact, I still maintain that my youngest brother owes his existence to my incessant, 12-year-old begging. 

"Please, Mom, please, have another baby!" I adolescently pleaded.

"But they're so much work," my mom protested. "Who will change all those diapers?"

"I will!" I fervently pledged. 

"Who will rock the baby at night when it's fussy?"

"I will!" I swore.

"Who will watch the baby during the day when I have to go to class?" She asked, responsibly concerned about the fate of her continuing education.

"I will! I can go back into homeschool! Think what a great learning experience taking care of a baby would be! I swear, Mom, I will do EVERYTHING! I will help! Please!" I feverishly sobbed, desperate for the powdery, heavenly smell of baby head.

Shortly after I turned 13, my brother was born. 

You're probably all expecting a hilarious twist now, where I gagged at the first poopy diaper and sheepishly took back all my promises, admitting that babies weren't all I thought they were. But the joke's on you, friend. I kept those promises. My brother was a very colicky baby who screamed through the night, almost every night. And almost every time, I rocked him and walked him around the house, begging him to going to sleep, occasionally crying myself, but never admitting defeat. I changed a good number of those diapers-- definitely not all, although that's how I remember it. I spent 7th and half of 8th grade in homeschool, learning a lot more than I would have in Social Studies. And I loved it. His head smelled great.

So when I say that I love babies, I want it to be understood that this is not some naive claim based on a rosy illusion of perfect pink-cheeked cherubs. I genuinely do love babies. Screaming, crying, pooping, and yes, occasionally sleeping, pink-cheeked and cherub-like. My main job for years was babysitting. I was briefly an Early Childhood Education major in college, until my love of English and impracticality dragged me away.

It would stand to reason, then, that when I discovered I was pregnant at the end of March this year, that I would be ecstatic. I had certainly expected to feel ecstatic. I had fantasized about this moment for years, if not my entire life, googling "spontaneous immaculate conception" any time my period was 15 minutes late...and yet here I was, sitting in my sister's bathroom, my hand shaking so hard I was a little afraid I was going to spray little pee flecks all over the counter, staring at two blue lines and feeling decidedly un-ecstatic. I felt empty. Panicked. Shaken.

Why?

Maybe it was because it was a little earlier than I had planned. My boyfriend and I were a bit less "married" than I had always envisioned. Having just been fired from my crappy, low-paying job, I wasn't exactly in the best financial position. I was in South Dakota when I found out, states away from my California home, and I had no idea how my boyfriend would react to this news, so there was an element of fear there. I justified my ambivalence as some combination of these factors. Understandable, I told myself. I just needed time to get used to the idea.

Time passed. I didn't get used to the idea.

I eventually got home and was able to talk to my boyfriend in person. He was thrilled. He got emotional and seemed to be experiencing all the ecstatic I had expected for myself. I was relieved, and a little jealous. He had always wanted kids, just like I had, but unlike me, he wasn't balking at the reality.

We got engaged, and had a plan to be married before the baby arrived. He assured me that we could make finances work, and laid out a reasonable plan that made sense to me. Everything was going to be ok.

But I wasn't ok.

I was miserable. I felt no joy, no hope, no anticipation. Only trepidation and worry. What if it's an ectopic pregnancy? What if I miscarry? What if the baby's deformed? What if I had a weird uterus? Instead of making a beeline for the baby stuff and cooing over the adorable onesies like I had before I was pregnant, I found myself avoiding that corner of every department store. Looking at baby blankets made me want to cry. What's wrong with me?

It didn't help that by week 6 of my pregnancy, the morning sickness started. Can we take a minute to discuss the horrible, hilarious injustice of that phrase? "Morning sickness" sounds like a gentle dawn malady, gracefully endured by wan, pale Romance novel heroines, always safely evaded by tea time.

HA.

This "sickness" was not graceful, endurable, or confined to mornings. It was an all-consuming barf-fest with no regard for time, location, or my mental health. Before I got pregnant, it had been four years since I last threw up, during an especially unpleasant flu. I've never been an easy barfer. It's hours of painful stomach cramps followed by wrenching, full-body heaves, that leaves me shaking, crying, and exhausted for at least a day afterward. I hate throwing up so much that I'd pretty much mastered the art of choking it back and suppressing it. I had hoped that when morning sickness hit, I would be able to employ my usual tactics

HA, again.

There was no suppressing this. This was devil possession. This was projectile, vicious, unpredictable, and unstoppable. I threw up in gardens, roadsides, public bathrooms, parking lots, all over myself, in my parents' hall, paper bags in the car, and every toilet I got near in the first 6 months of pregnancy. I barfed first thing in the morning, in the afternoon, all evening. I would even wake up in the middle of the night to throw up. My body was wrung out and sore, my face covered in little red and purple freckles from the blood vessels I'd burst by heaving. I couldn't eat. All the sites and doctors recommended the old standbys: crackers, small meals, ginger. Ginger made my stomach acid worse, and burned my torn-up esophagus. Eating saltines did nothing but make me hate saltines forever. There was no small meal in the world that could have made me feel better. I learned to stick to the three foods that nauseated me the least: dry cereal (specifically Captain Crunch), popsicles, and ramen noodles. I worried incessantly, between heaving, that the raspberry-sized embryo inside me would suffer some horrible consequences from my far-from-balanced diet. I was supposed to be planning a wedding, but I didn't even have the strength to get out of bed. I couldn't find another job, I couldn't function-- all I could do was lay in bed, cry, barf in a bowl, and wish, in a benign way, that I would die. I couldn't even focus on the bright side of carrying a baby, because I felt absolutely no connection to the life inside me. It didn't feel like a life. It felt like a really bad stomach bug my body was fighting. I didn't feel like a mother-to-be. I didn't feel anything. I just felt sick, and horribly guilty. 

Why wasn't I happy?

One day, I was at my fiance's house hanging out, and I made some smart-ass comment (as I am likely to do 50 times a day, sick or not). He laughed and called me a weenie.

 "Excuse me?" I said. "I am a holy vessel!" 

I was half-kidding, half-affronted. Here I was, carrying HIS seed, going through all of this, becoming a mother, suffering, damn it! How dare he call me a weenie!

"Yes, you are," he said, calm as ever, and kissed my head. "You're weenie, the holy vessel."

I laughed. At that moment, peace descended on my nauseated soul. I felt the stirrings of what would soon become real happiness, for the first time since I'd taken that pregnancy test. And I realized-- I had thought that since I had no illusions about the nature of babies, that I was being realistic about parenthood. Sure, I understood that babies are hard, smelly, loud work, but I adored them anyway. I adored them so much, that in my mind, I had elevated the people who bring them into the world to an almost deified level. Mothers, these magical beings that brought forth the squishy, lovely, unpredictable babies I enjoyed so much, had always had, in my mind, a serenity and a wisdom that was entirely beyond me. I respected them. I revered them. And in some un-looked-at part of the back of my mind, I had always expected to become one of them, someday. Someday, when I was old enough, wise enough, calm and holy and graceful enough. It wasn't the baby I was unhappy about-- it was me. Because I was not serene yet. I wasn't all-knowing yet. I am sharp and too soft, overemotional, too needy, sarcastic and maudlin and flaky and irreverent. I make really stupid jokes. I'm a weenie.

I realized then that it was ok. I didn't need to be an Earth Mother, tranquilly glowing over her raspberry-sized godhood. I could be a pun-making, impatient, depressed mess, and still grow this baby. Still love this baby. Still be this baby's mother. I am a conduit of the lifeforce that creates all mankind, and a sarcastic failure at life who still sometimes throws dirty socks away rather than doing laundry. I am sick, puffy, and glowing. I am Weenie, the Holy Vessel.

Of course, this revelation didn't cure the "morning" sickness. It didn't fix anything, really, because that's not how self-discovery works. But it did set me on the path back to being ok. And that's why I want to write about everything I'm experiencing and thinking and running into during this process-- because nobody was saying what I needed to hear. Nobody was being straight with me, or else nobody felt like I do. Even if I am one in a million, logic and world population dictates that there are at least 7,125 people like me. And if I can help even one of those 7,000 weenies feel less weird and alone, then it's well worth the two hours this post took.

Stay weird, 7,000 Weenies. We can do this.