October19
Hourly Feedings
I’m going to have a baby! Whoohoo! Like everything else in my life, pregnancy is something I planned and prepared for, but so far, I feel like a traveler who arrives at the airport fully aware of the final destination, only to learn that this particular trip must be made riding on the back of an ostrich. “What about my matching luggage?” I ask. “I picked it out specifically for this journey.” The ostrich offers no help. He just flaps his wings impatiently. So I hop on, leaving behind everything I thought I needed, hold on tight, and pray.
Needless to say, as much as I knew about pregnancy from friends and books, I was still caught off guard by the reality of it. I kind of assumed that my appetite would increase when my belly really started taking shape. This was not the case. At four weeks pregnant, I found myself stopping at Whole Foods to pick up peanut butter and bread so I could make an emergency sandwich in the car before going to a yoga class. At six weeks my meals attempted to make encore performances. And at seven weeks, I had out grown all my pants with zippers and buttons, which was about seven weeks earlier than I was emotionally prepared to deal with. My maternity pants now look like something a giant toddler would wear with buttons sewed on just below the oversized-elastic waistband and a faux zipper flap to keep up the appearance of grown-up pants. But at least I can both sit and breath at the same time when I wear these pants.
Another unexpected pregnancy occurrence is my wacko blood sugar. I wake up in the morning with the shakes, which means my hands and all my supporting muscles are jittery, like I just drank a pot of coffee on an empty stomach. My head feels like I’ve been fasting for days, and while I know that I need food, just thinking about the energy I’ll exert preparing breakfast is exhausting. And by prepare, I mean fetching a spoon from the drawer, grabbing a bowl from the cabinet, getting the yogurt carton from the refrigerator, stirring, and then dispensing the yogurt into the bowl. Pathetic? Probably. I’ve actually been contemplating buying the individual yogurt containers just to cut out a few steps.
Right now, most of my mornings are spent trying to eat enough food to fend off the shakes. It’s a delicate balance, because I’m in that stage where just thinking of food (with the exception of strawberry popsicles) makes me want to dry heave. When I do get enough food in me, I’ll inevitably feel a very strange wooziness, like I drank a glass of wine after taking an antihistamine. (I did this once, and only once, on a date in college. It was a first and last date.) Since I’m not able to drive when the woozies come on, I keep close to home these days. My midwife, has me eating every hour and a half in an effort to stabilize my blood sugar. She even has me setting the alarm to wake up and eat. I’m not kidding. I thought that I would get to wait until after the baby was born to start waking up every two hours to feed, but no, the training starts now. And just to make things a bit more interesting, I got food poisoning about two weeks ago and my meals actually did begin making encore performances.
When I first felt the symptoms of morning sickness a single thought began to occupy my mind. Women do this all the time. Women all over the world, in far less comfortable circumstances than mine, do this all the time. They go to work in fields and factories while they are pregnant, sometimes with another child strapped to their back so they can breast feed. And they somehow survive it all, only to do it all over again a few years later. So even though I’m doing a lot of bellyaching about my situation, I realize just how fortunate I am.
The majority of my nausea problems were solved with one trip to my brilliant naturopath, Dr. Hart Peterson. He says that most women experience morning sickness in the first trimester because their adrenals are stressed. The solution was to take more vitamin b in the forms of pantothenic acid. Within three days the nausea subsided. Women everywhere should know about this!
Throughout all of this, my husband, Ben, has been vying for sainthood. After spending nine hours at work, he comes homes to find me lying in bed, recovering from my second nap of the day, whining about being hungry, which is when he leaps into action and makes the first dinner of the evening, only to be followed by dinner #2, and dinner #3, and so on. Because of his skill in the kitchen or my lack of skill, Ben has always been the cook in our house, but now he does the grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry, and takes care of most of the errands too. Did I mention he is also in graduate school? Yeah, and all I do is eat, sleep and lie in bed trying to think of food that doesn’t make me want to hurl.
My constant need to eat reminds me of those old stories about genies trapped inside a magic lamp. The person who finds the lamp and releases the genie is granted three wishes. The first wish never turns out the way they thought it would, neither does the second, so they have to use the third wish to undo the first two.
The other day, when I was lying in bed, trying to ignore my growling stomach, I fabricated a conversation with a genie that could bring about this particular outcome. One might say, “I want to be able to eat anything and everything I desire and still be healthy.”
The genie will let out a maniacal laugh and say, “As you wish,” which is a very unorthodox reply for genies. For centuries the genie-party line was, ” Your wish is my command,” but like me, this genie is a huge fan of The Princess Bride.
Then out of no where a cloud of smoke appears, and poof, you wake up pregnant.
The truth is, getting pregnant isn’t that easy. I wished for it so many times that my heart would ache and throb every time I saw a baby. But I kept wishing, and wishing and wishing, until one day The Beloved leaned in close, just to make sure I was paying attention, because I so often am not, and said, “As you wish.”