Wonder Woman...or not

The back story to my entire life has been hearing about how wonderful pregnancy is. Seriously. I grew up around women who loved being pregnant. My Momma talked constantly about how she felt her most healthy, most connected, and her most strong while she was carrying her children. She would scoff (in a loving way) about the horror stories of birth (not invalidating them, but argueing that not all people have that experience).

I walked away from those stories, and into my own pregnancy, believing that I would harness the power of all the divine feminine while pregnant. I trusted that my body would rise to the occasion and be a champion. In fact, I believed it so strongly, that I scoffed at all the people who told me otherwise. In fact, in my own arrogant way, I laughed at them. Thinking "hrmph...pregnancy is what you make it."

HA. THE JOKE IS ON ME.

NEVER, in my entire life, have I felt so weak and so discouraged about anything. My body has taken over my world. I can't sleep on my back because it makes me sick. I can't walk as fast or with my full body the way that I do because every muscle and organ from my belly button to the top of my knees feels like it's being pulled, stretched, and reorganized. I cry too often, I'm a bitch too much. I want to clean, but need to sleep. I dream of holding my baby and in the very next breath, I'm asking myself why the hell I ever believed I wanted a child in the first place. I feel like I'm disorganized, I can't think straight and all I want to do is crawl into Kelly's arms and cry like a baby.

I swing on this incredibly drawbridge of emotions that range from intensely wonderful to horrendously horrible.

And everyone looks at me with pity. Or sympathy. Or with that smug, fucking arrogant look that says, "I told you so." Honestly, the next time someone says to me "just wait - it gets worse. Wait till you're in labor", I'm gonna knock them out. I want to - HAVE TO - believe that at some point this will stop feeling like so much work. That at some point, my life - the life that still demands my time and attention - will take some level of priority in my life. Because right now, I could give a shit less about working or cleaning or being polite or gracious. Or anything that requires me to exert energy or give attention to anything except this child growing inside of me.

Mom never said anything about this. Perhaps, because this is truly the loniest journey I've ever traveled. Nobody else can understand how it feels from MY perspective, because I'm the only one who lives my life.

See, everyone - I used to be Wonder Woman. I used to get 5 hours of sleep at night and clean and cook and be super-assistant to five people at work. I used to be able to do all of that and still have time to do things like read magazines, read books, work on the stocking that I started for Kelly two years ago, call my family and think about things in a future further out than five minutes from now.

Now, I'm a bit like Garfield. Grumpy, moody, washed up, tired and just in need of a long, long nap.