The Plight of Pregnancy

Here begins the tale of a woman, an unborn child and the plight of pregnancy.

It began with her vagina — a slight shooting pain.

She didn’t think much of it. There were always strange aches and pains at the beginning of pregnancy, right? Unfortunately, within a few days, this pain escalated into a driving force that began in her vulva and shot like a bolt of knife-like lighting straight into her asshole, which left only a lingering feeling of disbelief.

Disbelief, and the all too sudden knowledge that this pregnancy thing was not going to be all rainbows and lollipops as she had initially hoped.

After the awkward stint of sitting in crowded places with weird vaginal behavior, came the flatulence — posing yet another problem. Not only did the woman have to continually be on the lookout when secretly letting out her vapors, but her bedroom life had been diminishing quickly after the accidental ‘dutch oven episode.’

Then, there was the ill-fated moment when she believed she was letting out an innocent lady-like fluff and seconds later felt a torrent of poop running down her pyjama pant leg.

It was unpleasant.

Then came the nipple pain. The nipple pain that made her so damned crazy at one point she contemplated ripping off those nipples. She thought better of it in the end.

The bloat, the swollen feet, the fact that the heartburn was so bad during sex that the few times she was in bed with the hubs, she threw up in her mouth and swallowed it, in an attempt not to offend her husband during the bumpy ride.

None of these things were as bad as the complete and utter loss of decorum that occurred each time she visited the doctor.

Whether it be an intern doctor checking her every crack and crevice, or expressing to the receptionist when making the appointment, the nurse, when arriving, then the doctor — that her hemorrhoids were acting up again. And was it normal for them to burn so much?

When finally doing her diabetes testing, she was sure the results would come out positive as her weight gain was so phenomenal it even astounded her. Sugar was her friend. And due to her despicable behavior in which she wholeheartedly blamed on hormones, sugar was her only friend at that point.

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But a good friend. And fortunately, a friend who luckily didn’t screw with her blood sugar levels too much.

Every day the woman would set aside 20 minutes to do her kegel exercises, all the while wondering if the ‘experts’ were pulling her leg. How could this little exercise help her vagina bounce back from being the size of a cantaloupe? It was against the laws of physics, not to mention the most frightening mental image.

If the woman had thought that the visits to the doctor’s office were demoralizing, any ounce of dignity she had left was gone once being admitted into the delivery wing of the hospital.

There she lay, all 220 pounds of her. She found relief when bouncing on the large rubber exercise ball that was in the room. While holding her husband’s hand and her bare ass facing the open door, she cried tears of torment.

Oh, how she wanted this to be over. Not just the labor, not just the pain — the lot of it. The little quirks of pregnancy that no one ever tells you about. The embarrassing moments that cannot be avoided.

There is no denying that pregnancy and labor are a truly humbling experience.

And then after some odd hours of laboring, screaming, crying and telling the random nurse beside her that she may kill her if she doesn’t ‘shut the hell up.’ Not to mention pooping an extraordinary amount on the delivery table; there came a baby.

The baby did not diminish the pain, nor erase the woes of pregnancy, but it did allow the woman to understand why she had gone through it all.

And why she may do it again one day.

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The Plight of Pregnancy was previously published on momstown.ca and has been lightly edited since its first publication.

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Previously published on “A Parent Is Born”, a Medium publication.

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