Every woman dreams about those first baby kicks. It’s magical when you feel those little flutters, like a kiss from an angel in your womb. Okay, in reality it feels like you’re about to fart, but nevertheless it’s an amazing moment when you finally understand there’s a real baby with arms and legs growing inside your belly.
For a little while, you’ll be the only one who can feel those tickles; it’s like a secret code between you and your baby. Those little wiggles are your baby’s way of saying, Hello, Mummy! It’s a special meeting between the two of you—for the first time.
Fast-forward a couple of months and those sweet movements become a little less romantic. When people ask what it feels like, there’s only one answer: it feels EXACTLY how you think it would feel to have a human being trapped inside your body, trying to get out.
What starts out as gas bubbles turns into roundhouse kicks to the liver, and coward punches to the diaphragm that can literally knock the wind out of you, mid-sentence.
You will lie awake at night, being assaulted from within, wondering if your baby actually hates you. You’ll start to panic that if they’re awake and raging at 2 a.m. every day, will they keep to the same schedule on the outside? I can tell you: the answer is yes.
Did you know you’ll also be able to feel the baby’s hiccups? Yep, your little rascal loves, loves, loves to gulp that amniotic fluid, which is really just a sack of his own waste products. Yummy. So, as your little possum learns how to swallow, he’ll get hiccups now and then. Or every bloody day. It’s not annoying at all. It’s so cute how it feels like your baby has an unfortunate tic that means you’ll feel a steady bump every few seconds FOREVER. So fun. So cute. Not irritating at ALL.
Towards the end of your pregnancy, your baby will start to run out of room and will take it out on you by trying to stretch its little limbs. It’ll push and roll under your skin; tiny feet, hands and skull jutting out of your gut in the most nauseating way. You’ll look at your undulating belly, feeling every organ being battered from within and you’ll know exactly how they came up with that scene in Alien.
While all of this sounds bizarre, nothing, not one thing, compares to the sensation of having a small mammal scratch at your cervix with their razor-sharp claws, in a bid for freedom. You heard me.