What It’s Like to Be Pregnant
A primer for oblivious partners
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…
