What It’s Like to Be Pregnant
A primer for oblivious partners
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The other day I was in the kitchen making breakfast — this involves starting the coffee, then making the dogs their customary artisan slop bowls, then fielding requests from my children shouted at the top of their lungs for milk or juice or gummy vitamins or something to eat while they wait for me to make them something to eat — and my husband was relaxing in an easy chair, catching up on the news on his iPad, occasionally attempting to distract one of the boys from hollering that they’re starving or wandering into the kitchen to place a full palm onto the hot skillet, admire the cool sizzling noise, and then shatter windows with their screaming. “Wow,” I thought to my third-trimester-pregnant-37-years-old-ass self, “if he had any idea how my body feels all the time now, he’d offer to cook every meal and also sacrifice a limb to the gods for preventing his own murder by his haggard, exhausted, underappreciated wife.”
But then it hit me: he has no idea how I feel. I’m a writer, so I’m pretty good at putting things into words, and he’s an iPad addict, but he’s pretty good at listening some of the time, so I know I’ve adequately described how it feels like I’m wearing an apparatus filled with cement and I can’t find a sleeping position in which my hips aren’t screaming in pain for death (Yes! I spent $60 on the pregnancy pillow! It helps but not enough!) and my children view my baby bump as a proving ground for their headbutting valor and I walk like my hemorrhoids have grown faces, and I have weird shooting pains, likely from my skin stretching beyond its limit and the baby windmilling important internal organs, and I’m so tired that if I had one of those blinks where my eyelashes get all tangled up in each other I’d drop to the floor dead asleep and it’d take someone waving a Cadbury crème egg under my nose to wake me. That all sounds terrible, right? And hard? It is. But if you are a pregnant woman’s partner and you’ve never been pregnant, even though it seems like you can visualize the existence I’m describing, you have no idea what it’s like. You just don’t. Not until you’re the one realizing that every time you bend down to pick something up you make a noise like a climaxing hippo and have also trapped a passing stranger’s arm in your buttcheeks and the only way to free him is to bend over…
