Today, dear readers, I offer you a public service announcement for those of you who like to give advise to pregnant ladies and the ladies who have to listen to you.
When you are pregnant, people tell you all kind of things, from advice to old wives tales. It is usually amusing advice, but two things in particular have been bothering me.
When I was in my first trimester and very tired, people used to say this little gem to me all the time:
Sleep now because when the baby gets here you will never sleep again.
They always said it with this sarcastic gleam in their eye, as if they were saying something hilarious and giving me good advice at the same time. Let me assure you that I know that my days of getting a full night sleep are over already. I get up to go to the bathroom at least 3 times a night and I have already considered all of the ways a kid will change my life. Lack of sleep is the least of my concerns. I am already worried about teenage angst.
In addition, next time someone tells me this, I am also going to explain that sleep can not be stored in a bank like money. I can not sleep more now and feel rested in 5 months. Our bodies do not work that way and suggesting that I can do something about my sleep deprivation later right now is stupid and irritating. Just do us all a favor and stop telling pregnant women this.
Item number two is a huge lie that I have heard from all kinds of people. They tell it to you, again, in the first trimester when all you want to do is eat and sleep.
Just wait until the second trimester. You will feel great and have lots of energy.
Compared to what? Yes, you feel better in the second trimester then you did in the first, but you do not feel “great”. I have come to the conclusion that there are all kinds of things about being pregnant that no one ever tells you about, most of them unpleasant. Like random pains, numbness, acute hunger, weird digestive issues, boobs with minds of their own, and any number of odd things that are seemingly incongruent with a parasite in your uterus. When you are pregnant, you never feel great. There is always something weird going on with your body. I keep thinking of a cute baby and reminding myself that everything has a price.
The second half of this statement is also false for the same reason. You do have a lot of energy in the second trimester, but only when you compare your energy level to what you felt like the first three months of pregnancy. It is not hard to feel more alert then those first three months. I have had insomnia and anxiety related sleep problems before and that kind of tired is nothing compared to being pregnant tired. The bone crushing weariness in the first three months goes away in the second trimester, but you are still tired, all the time. I still rarely make it past 9:30 or 10 pm and it is all I can do to stay awake for one hour after dinner before dragging off to bed. A pregnant lady does not have the energy of a normal person, ever, because we are busy growing a human being and that takes way more energy then sitting at a desk all day. Please, please stop giving pregnant ladies hope that for their middle three months they will enjoy a normal life. They will not.
Our lives will never be normal again so no sugar coating, please. And no more sarcastic advice.
–Jane, public service announcement has ended *beep* *beep*