You get the feeling that some other primal part of you is driving your body, and you’re not even in the back seat, you’re in the trunk … and you’re running out of air.
To say that my first trimester was consuming would be an understatement. Everything was stark and foreign. As a result, sensations, emotions, and revelations were experienced to their fullest. They were dissected by and discussed with the most unsuspecting friends, family, and telemarketers.
Looking back on it now, I feel so desperately lucky. How often as adults do we embark on the adventure of doing something truly for the first time? In those instances, good or bad, we really live in the moment. It’s a rich and innocent state.
Even if it is accompanied by the sensitivity to smell, the moods, the brain shrinkage, the disgusting nausea and vomiting, the exhaustion, the weepiness, the body-changing weight gain, the g-a-s, the thrill, the panic, the rethinking of your whole focus and identity, the terror of “am I like my mother,” the whole shebang.
Have I mentioned that one of my greatest fears (besides bugs frolicking in my ear canal and being trapped with a windbag at a party) is vomiting? So when I got pregnant I talked to everyone I knew about morning sickness.
“I only threw up once, when I brushed my tongue.” – Zoe, mother of one
Anyone who would brush her tongue under any circumstances, much less in the grip of morning sickness, should expect to vomit.
“I was nauseous much of the time, but I dealt with it by eating as soon as the nausea came on and taking lots of naps, and I never actually threw up.” – Ruth, mother of two
Ruth is sort of perfect. Her eating-all-the-time strategy appealed to me.
“My first trimester was a bliss time full of yummy hormones, and all I wanted to do was lie in a field of flowers and have gnomes tell me stories.” – Wendel, mother of one
Sounded good.
Yet, many of the books I read told of women who interrupted presentations at board meetings to go throw up in trash cans, women who threw up on the bus, in restaurants, in class. The impression I got was that these women were like soldiers who hacked off their hanging, shrapnelled limbs and got back out there into the world without complaint. Well, I complained. Because I did not have a mild tongue-brushing case of morning sickness. Or even a case of “morning” sickness. I threw up all day, every day, into the night.
It’s been said about the first trimester that this is the time you really need that seat on the bus, but no one’s going to give it to you.
Although the symptoms may be most intense during this time, you won’t be showing yet, and often might not be telling anyone that you’re pregnant. To cover up my constant absences from events and my dismaying countenance, we resorted to saying that I had stomach flu. For eighteen weeks.
A sporty, young musician friend of ours, Lisa, came by to visit a few times during what she had no idea was my first trimester. If I came down to say hi at all, she saw a grey-green puddle in sweatpants, with a greasy ponytail, drag itself halfway down the stairs, grunt and half-smile in recognition, and slowly ooze back up to bed. The third time Lisa popped by I overheard her telling Janis, “Wow, Diane’s really had a lot of stomach flus this winter. Maybe she’s carrying a parasite.”
“Maybe,” smiled Janis, “maybe.”
I have no idea why an extreme version of first trimester symptoms happened to me. I was told that I had a high level of maternal hormones. The midwives said that a high hormonal level and intense symptoms were a good thing. Yes, there was a positive spin to be put on this. It meant the pregnancy would probably “take” and there was less chance of miscarriage. Or it could mean I was carrying twins. Or it could mean I was simply unlucky.
Odette, a colleague of Janis’s, had severe vomiting like mine. We clung to each other, milking each other’s stories of misery and triumph. She barfed for eighteen weeks. She took a medication that was later prescribed to me, Diclectin (a mix of vitamin B6 and antihistamine) and assured me that it was fine and safe.
In an e-mail, she recounted how she couldn’t do any housework, even though she had to take time off work, and how that affected her relationship with her husband.
“He’d come home from work to find dirty dishes piled to the sky in the kitchen because I just could not face the smell. I would cry in the bathroom because it began to hurt my throat every time I threw up. I had very morbid thoughts. (I tell you, major hormonal swings.) I do not think I will eat another Premium Plus soda cracker ever in my life. But I would do it all over again.” – Odette, mother of two
With Odette’s second pregnancy she was sick once more, and this time, it lasted for the whole nine and a half months. Near the end of her term, she had to be hospitalized for dehydration. She recently told us that she had decided to stop at two kids.
Another friend, Mina, refused to take any medication. She just toughed it out and still got to work each day. Well, Odette and I smirked, she only threw up in the mornings. Amateur.
“My wife threw up on me on the train as we were commuting to work. She started to cry because she was so embarrassed. I said, ‘Honey, don’t cry. I’m the one with vomit all over my shirt.’ ” – Paul, father of two
Charlotte Brontë managed to survive the consumption (tuberculosis) that killed each of her siblings in turn. Maria and Elizabeth in 1825, Branwell and Anne in 1849, and Emily in 1848. But Charlotte died in 1855 of hyperemesis gravidarum, excessive vomiting during pregnancy, just three weeks shy of her thirty-ninth birthday.
Odette and I feel terribly lucky to live in this century when instead of actually dying from morning sickness, we just wanted to die.
“I felt like I woke up every morning with a hangover – without the benefit of having been drunk.” – Tammy, composer, mother, and former workaholic
Besides the nausea, the symptom that knocks most women flat on their bodacious booties is intense exhaustion. Mind-numbing, body-dragging, bone-tired sleepiness. It’s like having a low-grade fever, complete with chills and shakes, for three months.
My exhaustion was so thick that I felt like I was in a constant fog. What I could make out of the world was muffled by the sound of my own hormone-thickened blood slushing in my ears. My body became a dense, hungry, angry animal that took control of my being. So, any thinking, reasonable, good-humoured part of my mind was left to wander dark and drafty mental hallways with nothing but a tiny candle to light its way to nowhere.
Of course, some women I spoke to just felt a little pooped by dinnertime. But we don’t talk to them any more.
I once overheard Janis telling someone that when she came home from work she would expect to find me in one of three positions: lying on the couch with a barf bucket beside my head; lying in bed with a barf bucket beside my head; face down on the bathroom floor.
The most trying way that this affected our relationship was that I felt like I was absent. I was not driving the car formally known as “me.” I wasn’t even in the backseat. I was in the trunk. And running out of air.
In many cases the sickness of the first trimester starts slowly, almost sneakily. At my seventh week, I still had a sense of humour about it.
One day Janis was making a list of things to do around the house, with items like “paint shelves, go for a run at 4:00, phone Aunty Mary” – so I made a list too:
• burp
• gag
• gag
• fart
• spit
• burp
• gag
• burp
I managed to get through it pretty well.
In the first trimester, there is a lot of gas. People will warn you about this politely, but if you’re standing too close, a pregnant woman’s morning belch could blind you. And there’s no point in a pregnant woman trying to stifle her burps, she’ll give herself a hernia. Moms-to-be can shame most frat boys. “Belching the alphabet, fellas? No problem. Can you recite the value of Pi?” Speaking of “frat,” the gas rumbles about in your lower GI as well.
When I was about nine weeks’ pregnant, I was invited to join a writing workshop that met every Wednesday night for two hours. I didn’t know how to tell the instructor that I was reluctant to attend because it was hard to sit in a room full of strangers for two hours without farting. Especially at night, which is prime farting time. I ended up going and taking frequent (and less and less discreet) breaks for “air.”
I also had a lovely symptom that I haven’t heard too many other women describe. Constant spitting. Some women experience an increase in saliva, or a different taste and consistency of their saliva. In my case, slobber would pool in my mouth and I’d have to spit it out to get rid of it. When I got too tired, I’d just let it run out of my slack jaw into a napkin, or after a long day, my shirt. By the end of the day I’d have a drool rash, just like a teething infant’s. This bizarre symptom would disappear as quickly as it came. Each morning I’d wake up and hold my breath – would it be a saliva-free day or another twenty-four hours of yearning for a spittoon? On the spit days, I’d end up shutting myself in the house, lest random people think I was a) lusting after them or b) disgusting. I have no idea how my partner still managed not to be repulsed – or not to tell me about it.
Yes, the smells! It’s true. A woman’s sense of smell increases to doglike sensitivity when she’s pregnant. They say that this is to protect you from ingesting anything that might harm your baby like tobacco, alcohol, unpasteurized cheeses, kitty litter, or KFC. I wanted to wear a cape with a big nose on it, “Super Shnoz!” Unfortunately Super Shnoz can’t always be trusted to know exactly what she’s smelling.
At about twelve weeks along I attended a theatre community gathering. It was my first night out in a while. I was still pale and sick, but was happy to be among friends, and to be far enough along that we could start officially spreading the good news. I was standing beside an actor friend of mine, Richard, who is like a brother to me. A cute (he’s fifty), slightly dishevelled, sticky-fingered brother. Suddenly I smelled pee. I was sure that someone must have literally pissed themselves. Well, who would be inadvertently walking around in stinky pee pants but Richard? I looked around in horror to the other people in the little circle I was chatting with. I thought, Dear God, we are standing in Richie’s pee and everyone is too polite to say anything. Then I realized the smell of urine was coming from his beer. It took me a moment to understand. Beer smelled like pee to me. Just like wine smelled like someone left a vinegar bottle in a shoe.
I could smell Nutrasweet. Did you know it has a smell? It does and it smells like rust. Luckily Nutrasweet is bad for you, so I didn’t mind giving it up. It becomes relatively easy for pregnant women to wean themselves off of drinking alcohol, being anywhere near smoke, and drinking coffee. It’s nature’s little gift to puking mamas and their babies.
When my mother was pregnant in the mid-1960s, her doctor said that she could smoke. In fact, he suggested that it would help her not gain too much weight. (She was told that she wasn’t supposed to put on more than twenty-five pounds.) She was also encouraged to keep drinking alcohol if it kept her calm. The doctor who recommended this also prescribed thalidomide during her barfy first trimester. (Luckily, she didn’t take it since thalidomide was later discovered to cause birth defects in some children.)
Besting addictions is a positive effect of the hormones. Losing your mental capacities is not.
We moms refer to it as “brain shrinkage.” This occurs when you wash your hair with bubble bath and put your phone in the bra drawer.
Before I got pregnant I was pretty sharp. Some people thought I was quite a smart young woman, but now, not so much. During pregnancy, words escaped me. I had trouble with simple sentences like, “Honey, can you pass the uh … the … uh … the thingmajig … the yellow whachamacall … that goes on the bread?”
“Butter?”
“No, no, it smells like gasoline. The whosy.”
“Margarine?”
“No! It’s for the uh … the long stringy whadgacallit that kids eat?”
“Cheese?”
“No! In a bun … the whatsitsname in a bun —”
“Thank you. Yes. And can you put the yellow sauce on it, not ketchup, but —”
“Mustard?”
“Yes!”
“We only have honey mustard.”
“Oh, don’t make me puke!”
The most shameful incident of loss of intellectual faculties involved our dog, a hairy, big-headed, Akita-shepherd cross named Stanley. One night around midnight I bolted awake from a sound sleep. I had a bad feeling. It was too still in the house, too empty. Something was wrong. I thought, The dog’s being awfully quiet. Hope he’s all right. I went downstairs to look for him, and he wasn’t there. I looked outside. I started to panic. I opened the door and called him. No dog. I woke Janis up to ask her in halting sentences that brought on burps and gagging where the dog was.
“Maybe he’s … braaap … lost … or … acckkk … run off?! Maybe he’s jealous … pfffffft … of the baby!” She reminded me that I had had the dog with me when I dropped off a video at the store before going to bed. “OH. MY. URRP. GOD.” I ran outside in my pyjamas. I could just make out the silhouette of his huge head in the backseat of our car. He’d been sitting there for three hours.
Luckily it was a balmy night. I let him out of the car. He stretched, yawned, and gave me a lick. He wasn’t even upset. This distressed me even more. I grabbed his big scruffy neck and burst into tears. Not knowing what else to do, I apologized profusely to him. His neck smelled like a dishrag, which smelled like the garbage can, which smelled like the river and the inside of an oven. I crouched in the middle of the street hugging Stanley, crying and retching by moonlight.
Janis tried to find some humour in what happened. I was inconsolable. How could I trust myself with a human baby?! Would I leave him/her in the car? How would our child survive the wreck that is me? Even Janis couldn’t reassure me. All I could do was gnaw on my guilt and resolve to always, always check the back seat.
“If you have a few silly ideas come into your head, just put them out again and think of something pure, lovely and of good report. We all have silly ideas come into our heads sometimes, but they do no harm if we just think of something else, or go for a walk. Cheer up and be happy.” – Helen MacMurchy, The Canadian Mother’s Book, 1931
Hormones can change a loved one’s personality so drastically, it may become unclear who they really are. Your formerly adorable angel may occasionally morph into a combination of Roseanne, Mister Hyde, and Blanche Dubois. The only consolation is that it is much more disconcerting to her than it is to you. The best thing you can do for her is to get past it. Or get out of the way.
My dear, mad-genius friend Bruce told me that, “Statistically, the rate for husbands murdering their wives increases when the wife is pregnant. It’s a male animal flight response.” He joked that when his wife, Tracey, was pregnant, he constantly reassured her that he was not going to kill her. What he doesn’t know is that she just might have killed him.
A husband of a friend of mine took me aside one afternoon at a brunch. In hushed tones, he asked me how Janis was coping. I started to say how supportive and kind she was, how she put up with my loss of personality, capacities, and epiglottal control. He interrupted, “No, I mean how is she coping with your moods.” I told him that the hormones were mostly making me spew, not snap. “Lucky her. I’m still recovering ten years later. I think a lot of those moods are in your head anyway.”
I was so shocked by the last statement that I didn’t ask him how it was that he could accept that hormones could do a little thing like create life from thin air, and provide the balanced food to support it, but if a mother gets a little testy it’s “all in her head.”
The dismissive mythology around women and our emotional states got really annoying to me when I was pregnant. So here’s a news flash: Mood swings in pregnancy are real, and while we’re at it, so is PMS. Let’s all just accept each other’s endocrine systems once and for all. I personally don’t ever have the urge to go out and hit an inanimate object really hard with a stick, but I respect that some men are hormonally driven to do so. A pregnant woman is doing life’s most important job, so let her get a little snippy.
Before I got pregnant, I was relatively easygoing, anyone could tell you that. But not any more. One crisp winter day, Janis and I were out for a drive. Janis was behind the wheel and I was in the passenger seat reading the newspaper. Janis kept taking quick, furtive glances at the headlines as she was driving. This is a cute habit Janis has had for years. Suddenly, I found it intensely irritating. As patiently and sweetly as I could, I said, “Honey, do you think you could stop reading the newspaper while you’re driving, FER FUCK’S SAKE?!”
Those last three words exploded from my mouth. We both gasped. It was like someone had unzipped my skull and a foul-mouthed serpent came popping out wearing a fright wig. From then on, I tried desperately to remember to speak gently to Janis, who would spend the next nine months following me around, picking up the little pieces of my mind that had wandered off, like toddlers at the zoo. But it just didn’t fly. I had no control:
“Do you think you could close the fridge door, fer fuck’s sake?!”
“Could you please throw out that godawful, putrid, flowery incense, fer fuck’s sake?”
“Could you not breathe like that? Like through your nose like that? Shh with the breathing, darling, fer fuck’s frikkin flippin’ sake!”
It came to a head one day when I was listening to my answering machine. Janis called out, “Pause it. Pause it.”
I couldn’t hear her, “What?” I mumbled. I was sitting there sick as a dog with my chin on my desk. Typing the word blech in all the different fonts. blech blech blech
“I want to listen to that!” Janis snapped.
“Okay.” I slouched. And I just let the tape keep playing.
blech blech blech
“Stop the tape. Diane, I need to hear that. Why didn’t you stop it?”
“Well, then rewind it and listen to it yourself, fer fuck’s sake! Why are you yelling at me, fer fuck’s sake?!” I slammed my desk repeatedly in frustration and glared at her.
Janis burst out laughing. I burst into tears. Janis held me as I sobbed unrelentingly. She reassured us both that it was about time I got in touch with my anger. “Good for you!” she even said. That was then.
In our relationship we always had a nifty balance. Janis had a short fuse, but got over anger fast. I had a longer fuse, but when I did get angry I stayed that way for a long time, i.e., I sulked. The balance worked for us. When “fer fuck’s sake” started, my fuse was much shorter, and yet, I sulked longer. In order to keep our delicate homeostasis from swinging wildly out of whack, we had to make a game of my new-found temper. We ended every sentence with “fer fuck’s sake” just for fun:
“Your mom called, fer fuck’s sake.”
“Buy some cheese, fer fuck’s sake.”
“That’s a pretty blouse, fer fuck’s sake.”
Unfortunately, this all played havoc with my identity. Many women mentioned that the physical and emotional chaos of the first trimester tested their sense of their essential selves. It made them silently question the relationships closest to them. I remember feeling terribly disconnected from my partner, looking at her as if from a great height. Since my “no touch zone” started at my chin and wrapped itself around my body, her caress was painful and brought on waves of gagging. I no longer shared her sense of humour (or anyone’s for that matter), I could do no physical activities with her. I fell asleep during most conversations. I didn’t like anything or want anything. I was entirely self-involved.
During those times the words that kept repeating in my head were “I’m not up for this” and “I’m backing out!” I felt like I was being tested, and if I failed, I would be sure to be unmasked as a lousy person, partner, and mother. My true nature as a weak and spineless phony would be revealed. I believed that I couldn’t cope with this, and if I couldn’t handle this part, how would I handle labour? Or motherhood?
These dark thoughts contributed to a feeling of isolation, but it was at a dinner party one evening that I officially became a pariah. Not only could I not help but make an “ew-y” face and a barely audible “uchh” sound each time I picked a scallop out of my pasta and plunked it onto Janis’s plate, but I spent the night glumly watching other people being hilarious and was not able to join in the laughter. All I could talk about was how no one talks about this feeling. This overwhelming feeling to talk about nothing else. I saw people’s eyes glaze over in boredom and then horror when I repeatedly said things like, “Oh and the burping! No one mentioned that!” I knew they expected me to be overjoyed and thrilled and grounded in maternity. I couldn’t. I was like a patient who was too overwhelmed by her illness to think of anything or anyone else.
When I got home, I was bleak, depressed, and couldn’t stop crying. I just wanted to be alone, but was terrified of being abandoned. I wanted to talk of nothing but the baby, but was afraid of being trapped with it. I wanted people to know how debilitating this first trimester felt, but didn’t want to be pathologized. I was a mess.
Yet all this psychic storm was manageable compared to what did me in, what I feared most, what made me lose track of the point of all this sickness (the fact that a baby comes out in the end) – the vomiting.
Although it was all-day sickness, I didn’t just lie there and take it. I tried to combat it. Everyone I met seemed to have a cure. People who have no frikkin clue what you are going through will suggest some of the following coping mechanisms in the name of being helpful:
• ginger
• ginger tea
• ginger ale (enough with the ginger already!)
• lemon juice
• vitamin B6
• almonds (for the vitamin B6)
• crackers
• acupuncture
• homeopathic remedies
• massage (don’t touch me)
• exercise (I can’t move)
One of the kitschier cures was wearing those seasickness bracelets that sailors use. The “bracelets” look like groovy 1970s tennis sweatbands with a little red dot in the centre. The dot needs to be positioned exactly three fingers from your wrist in the middle of your forearm. It will hit a pressure point and trick your brain into not feeling nauseous. Well, matie, it’s not my brain that’s barfing.
The most demoralizing upchucks were always when I would throw up the remedies that other people suggested for the throwing up. I’d drink ginger tea and heave. I’d painstakingly and with shaky hands squeeze the juice from six lemons, drink it, and immediately regurgitate it into the sink. I’d try to hydrate in order to compensate for the water loss of constant retching so that I wouldn’t die like a Brontë, and I’d end up instantly spitting up the water or juice or ginger ale until there was nothing left but the dry heaves. So I stopped drinking water, and then the crackers that I’d just eaten would gather in a clump and would sort of slide up my throat in slow motion and plop in a ball into the toilet. Which was preferable?
Another Catch-22—type gem occurred when I was barfing so much that I got the hiccups, and then the hiccups made me laugh, which made me barf.
Apparently, my mother’s naturopathic dentist had a friend whose sister’s cousin had terrible vomiting and all she did was take vitamin B6 and drink the juice of boiled barley grains and she was totally fine. In fact, she had tons of energy and started working out again! By the time I was told this suggestion, I was ready to throttle the next well-meaning soul who had a friend with a cure. The implication was that if I wasn’t able to stop throwing up, something was wrong with me. It was all in my head, or I brought it on because of stress, or my attitude, or my karma, or my outfits.
In case someone judges you in this way, let me be clear: It is not your fault! Do not let anyone tell you that you should be feeling better and that if you’re not it’s because you are: too high-strung, too angry, too toxic, too negative, you’re carrying a boy, you’re carrying a girl, you don’t really want your baby! Just know that it will pass and the result will be worth it.
You may even eventually find it funny. Looking back, some of the places that I threw up were pretty ridiculous:
• in the tub
• on the table by the bed
• in the bed
• in the elevator to the midwife’s office
• behind a parked car
• while driving the car
One of my favourites occurred when Janis and I were walking Stanley through Cawthra Square Park. This half-acre of downtown Toronto park space is referred to as one of the most “colourful” parks in the city. It’s inhabited by many homeless people, street kids, drug and alcohol users, dog walkers, cruising and/or strolling men and women, moms with kids, and the occasional jogger with a strong stomach. On a warm day, the plethora of smells can border on Eau de Dumpster.
Stanley, Janis, and I were almost through the park when big Stan stopped to do his business, and all of a sudden I had to stop too, to lean over and barf in the snow. Stanley seemed embarrassed by my behaviour and, in mid-poop, gave me a look as if to say, “Do you mind. I’m trying to void my bowels here.” Then Janis gagged at the sight of me barfing, which made me barf some more. We were an excellent-looking family. The surrounding rubbies were seriously looking at making a complaint. I felt okay though, because everyone barfs in Cawthra Park.
Despite the festival of foulness, I consider myself lucky. I’m self-employed – also known as “often unemployed” – so I didn’t have to show up to work. My sister, Laura, was sick at work and couldn’t tell anyone for the first few weeks. She’d feel a gag coming on and lean over the garbage can by her desk in case she might vomit. One time she was leaning over, mouth open, when the dean of the department walked in. She pretended that she was looking for something she’d dropped. Her gum, maybe?
She’d also sneak out of business meetings early so she could go into the office of someone who was still in the meeting and sleep on their floor.
It is amazing how quickly we can adapt to a new reality. I began timing how fast I could feel a gag coming on, shuffle to the bathroom, drop to my knees, tie my hair in a scrunchy, take off my glasses, lift the toilet seat, barf, put the seat down, put on my glasses, and leave the bathroom. I got it down to a minute and a half. It’s good multitasking practice for chasing after a toddler.
Many books will also tell you to make sure you take in certain foods and vitamins for your baby’s nutritional needs, especially in the delicate first trimester. They will tell you this is your responsibility as a mother. They will imply that it’s the least you can do to keep your baby alive. However, my midwife explained to me that your fetus is a self-centred little thing. It will get all the nutrients it needs from your body. You may end up anemic, pale, feeble, starving – with black circles under your eyes, and bones like bubble wrap – but your baby will be fine. So if all you can keep down for fifteen weeks is peanut butter and crackers, so be it. Baby will still be nourished.
A tip on nutrients for baby: Many women can’t keep down those horse pills that smell like decaying yeast, otherwise known as the pregnancy Multivitamin. If you can’t keep it down, don’t worry. Stop taking it and just pop a folic-acid pill once a day until the nausea passes.
As a theatre artist, work is sparse, and when it’s there, time and money are so limited that you develop a Spartan work ethic. I have toughed through shows when I had strep throat, stomach flu, bronchitis, bleeding gashes, and really bad cramps. I did shows after funerals of loved ones. I’ve fainted on stage, recovered backstage, and got back on the boards.
Mind over matter is truly amazing. However, that implies a mind that is somehow on your side, instead of that grain-of-rice-sized freeloader’s you’re hosting. For the first time, my theatre work ethic failed me. I couldn’t manage to do anything creative beyond making a spit-up bib out of my pyjama shirt.
At this point in the pregnancy, we came up with a nickname for our fetus. A very helpful Web site, www.babycentre.com, pointed out that this thing that was making me hurl my guts out was the size of a lima bean. From then on, our little one became known to all and sundry as “The Bean.”
By week twelve, I was looking forward to a lessening of the symptoms. There was none. It was then that many women I spoke to admitted that morning sickness left them more around week fifteen or so. They don’t tell you this when you’re puking at week eight. No. Then they say, “You only have four more weeks of it.” I think if they said, “You only have seven more weeks of it,” more women would be convicted of murder.
This unfortunately is the best salve I have to offer: No matter how difficult your pregnancy turns out to be, it does end, and you will be you again – although a richer and more Amazonian survivor. And, with any luck, you’ll be too busy to feel bad about anything that happened before your beautiful baby arrived.
At first, I followed Ruth’s advice and ate whenever I was nauseous. I hoped vainly that having food in my stomach would help me to stop heaving. That is how I ended up puking for eighteen weeks and still gaining weight. That, and the fact that the only things I wanted to eat were cheese and fries. Some books will tell you that you really don’t need to gain anything for the first three months, or no more than five pounds. I always imagine that the people who offer these arbitrary weight goals are weedly thin men or women with pinched mouths and a disapproving “tch” constantly at the tip of their tongues. They iron their jeans. They have few friends and that’s probably because they can eat whatever they want and they don’t gain weight.
When I told my midwife, Sara, that I had put on twelve pounds already, she merely looked at me inscrutably and said, “Yes?” and waited for more. So I pressed on, “Well, that’s a lot.”
“Not really.”
“I mean, shouldn’t I be worried? Isn’t that bad?”
She told me about the midwife from Denmark who had just visited their clinic. The Danish midwife was shocked that women were weighed every time they came for an appointment. Of course, the Danes show shock by murmuring, “Hmmmm.” She said that in Denmark the women are never weighed. Her philosophy was: Who cares how much they gain, as long as they are healthy and their blood pressure, glucose, and protein levels are not too high.
I loved this attitude, and tried to abide by it. I felt full of feminist ire toward a society that values thinness so much that we tell pregnant women how much they “should” gain. Before I began to gain weight, I vowed that I would not be sucked in by the judgemental attitude that results in women being self-conscious at such a glorious and powerful time. I would not focus my energy on my appearance when I was creating life inside me! If my hormones wanted me to gain a hundred pounds, so be it!
Until Janis looked at me across the living room one day and called me her “chubby cutie.” Apparently she thought I looked adorable with my double chin and puffy face.
I burst into tears. Janis instantly apologized and rushed to give me a hug, but got knocked back against a wall by a tremendous and liberating belch.
“I remember watching some TV show in my third month about pregnant models. Why, only God knows, but I’m watching this show and they all looked really cool in hip, clingy floral pants and midriff shirts with their big bellies sticking out saying, ‘Hello, world, look at my stomach’ and they were all sitting on a huge sofa giggling. I threw an orange at the screen and cracked it.” – Robin, mother of twins
A provocateur director friend of mine, Alisa, dared me not to tell anyone I was pregnant for as long as I could, and just let the weight slowly creep up. She wanted to observe people around me saying, “Yeah, have you seen Flacks lately? She’s really let herself go …”
There is one element of first trimester weight gain that makes it impossible to pretend that you are anything but pregnant. The boobs. It starts immediately. First, they are just sensitive and tingly. Pretty quickly, they start to grow. And grow.
One night I took off my shirt and tried to sneak into my pyjama jacket. Janis caught me and said, “Hold it! Let me look at you!” I froze. “Wow, did your breasts grow again in one day?” I looked in the mirror and it was someone else’s body staring back at me. I felt weird, like this was some science-fiction story, and I was growing at a phenomenal rate. I almost didn’t want to see my breasts. I felt out of control.
That is one of the toughest things for women to deal with. The lack of control. The fact that an animus, unconscious, personalityless, strong part of them was taking over. They had to just “let go” of everything, including their own bodies.
Robin advised not to bother letting go:
“Okay, soooo what’s this ooga-booga good lesson about giving up control? DON’T EVER GIVE UP CONTROL. It’s like people telling me to reduce my stress or tension. I like my stress and tension. It keeps me going. In fact I need it to survive, it keeps me in a constant state of disgust, an essential part of my personality and well-being.”
As troubling as it is to be forced to contemplate losing control, it’s good practice for being a parent: learning how to surf the chaos.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, many of us Jews have a tradition of not telling anyone the “news” until the second trimester because we are a paranoid and highly suspicious tribe and rightly so. We don’t tell “just in case, God forbid, I hate to say it but ya never know, something should happen.”
Sometimes something does. In my case, it happened during a night that Janis was up north visiting friends. After a fun-filled day of throwing up, I went to bed early. At 10:30 p.m. I started heaving. It went on until there was nothing left. I called Janis to come home. By midnight I was awakened by a bad stabbing pain in my gut. I lay on the bathroom floor. I reasoned that it was so laborious to lift my head that it was better to stay there. Also, I observed that I looked more pale and pathetic next to our cool blue tiling and maybe, like in a fairy tale, someone on a white horse would come and rescue me.
Janis arrived in her black rented truck around 1:00 a.m. and hoisted me up and back to bed. By 3:30 a.m. I was at it again. We started to worry that this wasn’t just morning sickness. The stabbing pain was centred in my lower belly.
Not knowing what “normal” morning sickness entailed, we decided to call Telehealth Ontario, a new toll-free emergency help line. The optic-enhancing ads for it showed caring and well-rested young nurses offering instant aid. We dialled.
A nurse named Jennifer asked Janis for the correct spelling of her name, address, and postal code for their statistical records. Then she asked to talk to me. Janis said that I was throwing up at the moment, and maybe she could relay any information about my condition. Jennifer insisted she needed to talk to me personally. I wiped stomach acid from my chin and shakily took the phone. Jennifer asked me for the correct spelling of my name, my address, my postal code.
When I asked what could be wrong with me, Jennifer inquired as to how far along I was. “Eight weeks,” I said. She paused and then replied that she couldn’t really say what it was, and that it was best if I went to Emergency and let them take a look at me.
We got ourselves to the hospital and were sent to a triage nurse. Denise had sharp, ferretlike features, a tight grey ponytail, and a desperate desire to move things along. She told us in a real no-nonsense fashion that there would be a long wait, maybe six to eight hours. She asked how far along I was and when I said “eight weeks” she said it sounded to her like I was having an ectopic pregnancy. This occurs when the egg plants itself outside of the uterus, usually in the Fallopian tubes. She suggested that if we could find a gurney, I should lay down. We asked if we could be given priority because I was pregnant and she said she had people there with chest pains. Both Janis and my hearts were pounding as we stared the possibility of losing the baby in the face. That was the first moment that I realized how badly and how truly I wanted to have this child. Janis was stubbornly convinced that the nurse was wrong, and that I was going to be okay. I was not so sure.
Finally, we found a gurney and I fell asleep for a bit. I was later awakened by a nurse taking a blood test. Then back asleep to be awakened by them wheeling us into another section of Emerg. A brisk doctor came in, did a few listens with a stethoscope, felt my stomach, and said he’d be back when the lab had results from the blood tests. I held Janis’s hand and we tried to squeeze our dire thoughts away. Janis distracted herself by becoming outraged with our doctor’s flippant manner after we had waited so many hours to see him.
A few hours later, the brisk doctor returned and said the pregnancy was normal. We finally exhaled. It looked like it might be a bad case of the flu on top of severe morning sickness. He gave me a prescription for the anti-nausea drug Diclectin, assuring me it was designed for pregnant women and that his own wife took it. Then he leaned back, almost lounging against the counter, to answer any questions we had. He sighed that no one tells you how uncomfortable pregnancy is. His wife also had severe morning sickness. He called her a gladiator.
We got the pills, I took one, and we slept. This gladiator spent the next day on the sofa watching football and reading People Magazine. On the cover was a picture of Prince Edward and Sophie Rice Jones. She had just had an ectopic pregnancy. The focus of the article was about how no one visited her in the hospital. “Poor Sophie Rice Jones,” I wept. (I also wept at an article about a dog who dials the phone for his blind owner.) I resolved to write Sophie a letter of support. But then my brain shrunk and I forgot.
“I had a pretty easy first trimester. No throwing up and I was still able to work. One day, I went for a long hike with the dogs and I felt so good, that I pushed it farther than I meant to. When I got home, I had intense cramps, and some blood spotting. I called my husband, Steve, at work, and was sobbing, ‘It’s my fault, I brought this on, I did this!’ He called the midwife’s office. They told me to lie down, not exert myself, and if the cramps or bleeding continued, to get to Emergency. Once I lay down, I fell asleep, and the spotting passed.” – Netty
My second scare happened about a month later. After so many weeks of trudging about in an opaque vista of sickness, I awoke one early morning feeling quite normal. There was no whoosh whoosh of hormones, no fog, nausea, or dullness. Like when the air conditioning’s been on for a while and you don’t notice it. And then it suddenly shuts off, and everything is bright, loud, and clear. I felt like me again for the first time in weeks. Was I happy about this reprieve? Of course not. I’m Jewish. I lay there for about an hour and a half silently panicking that this meant that the pregnancy was over. Finally I woke Janis up. “I don’t feel anything.”
“What? Well, that’s good.”
“No, I feel nothing. I feel like it’s over.” I started to wail. “It’s my fault. I said I hated this.”
It’s true. The night before as I tried to answer Janis’s question about what exactly I did all day, I actually said the words I hate this. I wanted her to feel and understand the nastiness of my state. I felt sick, uncomfortable, uneasy, unattractive, and uncaring. When I walked the dog, in my slow shuffle, old ladies left me in the dust. “You know what I do all day? I fart.” I had wanted to be bad and tempt fate and act like a baby and not a mother and just complain. So now we were dealing with the repercussions of my evil impulses. What had my selfish thoughts manifested? No hormones were coursing through me. Those cranky old Hebraic superstitions were right!
Janis went on the Internet to www.babycentre.com to look up if you can suddenly stop having symptoms for no reason. I paced. Then suddenly I burped. Oh, I thought, that’s a good sign. I burped again. Good. Very good.
Then, is this nausea I feel?
Then, a gag. YAH!
Janis peered into the hallway with hope in her eyes.
Suddenly I had two huge coughing gags and a small vomit. “YAHAHA!” I ran into the office and did a flailing, high-energy, celebratory jig, “I puked! I puked! Thank God!”
I squeezed my bloated, tender stomach, “I love you,” I belched to my brave strong baby hanging on mightily despite me.
A tip: There’s no mistaking it. This is a tough time. Don’t feel the need to grin and bear it. I’d advise kvetching, seeking help, trying Diclectin for nausea. If you’re one of those women who have no symptoms in this time, I bow to you because obviously you were a highly evolved soul in your previous life. Just try not to gloat around your grey, shuffling, farting, crying, gagging psycho pals. Or in the next life, you could come back as a grub.