I don’t like being pregnant.

There, I said it.

I do not like being pregnant. Gravid. With child. Gestating. Incubating. I do not feel all warm and fuzzy when my proverbial oven is cooking buns, and I can think of about a million things that are more physically pleasurable than the elegant condition known so charmingly as being ‘knocked up’.

I. Do. Not. Like. Being. Pregnant.

Please don’t hate me. I know it is not in the best of taste for an infertile woman who has hit the baby jackpot to admit it, but I just don’t get off on being the approximate dimensions of a planetary satellite. I like to be able to turn over in bed at night, unassisted. Heck, I like to sleep on my stomach. Apart from the superficial physical aspects, being pregnant mainly makes me feel alternately terrified my babies have died while I wasn’t looking, or simply inescapably enormously fat.

I am a traitor. I do not ‘glow’, I ooze sebum and I collect backne. I sweat like a pig-wrangler on a busy day. My nose develops a non-disguisable (by even the most enthusiastic hairstylist) collection of pimples. I snore. Loudly.

Even in the first trimester, when the whole shebang is physically easy for a non-porcelain phone conversating type, I do not like it. I am crippled by horrifying anxiety. I have weekly scans, because magical thinking tells me my baby shall die if I do not peek as often as possible. I own a doppler and spend literally hours finding a heartbeat at  early gestations. I cry if I am not successful.

I do not like being pregnant.

My grooming suffers in exponential concordance with my expanding girth. I stop brushing my hair. I gain forests in areas that are normally heavily logged. I wear items more conventionally recognisable as tents, as apparel, and in public.

I do not lovingly stroke my belly as I sit, but wince as a contraction reminds me that bending in the middle is yet another item ranked rather highly on my personal uterine verboten list. Unmedicated with contraction stopping Fun Drugs, I go to the toilet about fifty times an hour, more than half convinced I shall prolapse an infant whilst sitting on the can because the pressure in my pelvis dictates that not even a millimetre of urine and a baby can coexist peacefully. Medicated with drugs that should drop my blood pressure, I become horribly hypertensive anyway and I swell until I am cursed with Fat Fingers to go with my Fat Arse.

I am hungry all day long and additionally at 10pm, midnight, 2am, 4am and 6am, but the insane reflux means that I have to choose between enjoying a second, more acidic, version of each meal or spitting partly digested food and stomach acid into the bathroom sink. Sometimes a bucket, because I cannot walk beyond a waddle.

I get ravenous appetite derived stretchmarks on my ass, and when the blasted thing duly shrinks post partum, I am left with cheeks that could hold pencils up. Hands free. But that’s okay, because so can my stomach. Also, my bowels can really hang out, thanks to the wonders of a diastasis recti. I do not like what being pregnant does to my body. The first time I saw myself post partum, I almost cried. My stretchmarks and muffin top bother me, they fail to fill me with warmth that I mostly successfully (2/3 of efforts to date) grew human beings.

I do not like being pregnant.

There.

Now that I have said it, I can feel simultaneously heavily relieved to have gotten that small confession off my chest and mildly terrified that the heavens shall open up and the rain of judgement shall pour forth heavily upon my ungrateful head. I love my children, but I do not like being pregnant. That is all.