Järistyksiä

Well. I was just going to drop a line on the topic of being pregnant and all that, but first I must complain about Blogger - or rather, about services that change without me having any impact on them. So are all Bloggers now a part of the Google emporium? I've been updating my blog so rarely that only now I had to go through the whole "create a new account with google ID" -thing. I just want to do things like I used to and not be bothered by updates or being forced to sign up for something I didn't originally intend to sign up for. Same with Yahoo, too. They keep pestering me to change to the new updated version. My online bank changed recently, too. And then I have to learn new ways of doing things and using these programs. This really smells like.... like I'm getting old and stiff and can't adjust to change anymore. Food for thought alright.

That's what you get for turning 30 (oops, no, 31), getting married and having kids. You get old. Or alternately, life gets so full of other things to tinker with that keeping up-to-date with updates is at the very bottom of must do -list. The top spots are taken up by fun stuff like researching daycare options and
choosing a diaper service.

Which brings me back to the original topic of this post. Just a few observations from along the way:

A) Everybody wants to know the gender of the baby so they know what color gifts to buy. This bugs me to no end. Am I supposed to start conditioning the child into 'what girls are like' and 'what boys are like' before it even knows what it is itself? And no, we don't know the gender either. We chose not to and boy am I glad we did.

B) Everybody assumes I'm feeling heavy and tired and have all kinds of complaints. I don't. Just a few. Back to those later.

C) People are quite open about their respective pregancy experiences - when I told my boss and a few other people at work (in November) I was surprised to have such a supportive response. It felt like, well, like an initiation in an old-fashioned anthropological sense (no they didn't dangle me on a rope from a cliff or seal me up in a mud hut for a month. You know what I'm trying to say). It was like I had entered a loosely-knit society, a circle of people that are only brought together because they have had children themselves, a layer of human existence I'd known was there but now got to experience myself. In the beginning, since I didn't look very pregnant, only a few people knew. I had a few visits from close co-workers who just came into my office, sat down and chatted about their experience for some time. It seems simple, but in hindsight, it was important to feel right away that the work environment was supportive and rather than looking for ways to discharge me formed a loose safety-net on my behalf. The sincere woman-to-woman (or, if I dare say it, mother-to-mother) contact was, and is, also meaningful. None of the friends I have here have children. Imagine thinking about buying a car, without really knowing anything about cars, and not having anyone to talk it over with, because all your friends drive bicycles. You get the point.



So how is it being pregnant? First three months were a little harsh. I started my second to final semester in graduate school, got a new job and got pregnant all within a month. I felt nauseated every day, and very tired at the end of the day - I think more tired than I even realized then. Work-home-dinner-sleep and School-home-dinner-sleep was what I did. At work I had to plan when I could have meetings with people so I wouldn't be lost in nausea-land while trying to talk with someone. Feeling sick got me feeling frustrated. Previously, if I'd felt sick I was the only one to blame. Either I hadn't excersized enough, had eaten too much, or had a hangover - all within my reach to rectify if I so wished. With pregnancy, you can do everything right and the nausea just doesn't go away. Luckily, mine was over around the third month. Some women have it all nine months. And all those people with long-time incurable illnesses: you have my sympathy. I think I can relate to the helplessness and frustration a little better now.

After the three month mark it's been mostly swell. There are all kinds of small shifts in bodily functions that happen and are different for every woman, small twinges and tweaks in the uterine area, reshuffling of bowel movements (not necessarily bad), increase in liquids, including blood which then may lead to shortness of breath because there is more need for oxygen for the extra blood, and so on. None of these have been that bad, some even good. Instead of obsessively looking up everything on the internet (like I did in the first month or two), it's been a good philosophy to think that any change one notes is probably normal and pregnancy related. So far that's been true.

Now, approaching 8 months, I've noted a few more things. My legs get swollen, so much so that chosing socks to wear has little to do with anything else but the tightness of the mouth of the sock. Most are too tight anyway, no matter how I choose. This makes for amusing body-molding experiences but can also be quite uncomfortable. It's nice to put one's feet up at the end of the day and see the inch-deep sock marks around the ankle disappear in the course of about 20 minutes. Also, I had a bad case of the hives (nokkosrokko). As the dermatologist put it, 3 percent of the time they can tell what causes it. The rest is a guess. But it is common to get symptoms in pregnancy, something I had never heard of before (bet ya you hadn't either). Hives is an allergic reaction of the skin that causes an itchy rash that can spread all over the body. It did. It was itchy. I couldn't sleep or sit down so instead of waiting it out I went to the doctor. And now it's all gone, with the help of some medicine that both my OB and the dermatologist insist will not harm the baby. Funny thing is I've never been allergic to anything, and have no idea what could have caused the reaction. Either it was a bug bite or the blue cheese dip I had for dinner. Go figure.

So that's that. I'm not really tired, I don't feel super heavy or clumsy although I can't always walk quite as fast as I'd like to, and there is no pain in all this other than the baby occasionally poking me in the liver or standing on my bladder or whatever. And that's not really painful either, just a little annoying.

For the brave few who actually read the whole entry there is a price at the end: a picture of the belly! Apparently, I don't look as pregnant as many others do at their 7-8 months. After asking me how far along I am (in the American way, this happens casually in the supermarket, the bus, the ladies room, etc.) the reaction invariably is "You're so small!". And just last week someone at work came around to congratulate me - they had just found out I was pregnant. I guess you could mistake it for a beer belly.