The Plight of Pregnancy

Here begins the tale of a woman, an unborn child and the plight of pregnancy.

It began with her vagina- a slight shooting pain.

She didn't think much of it. There were always strange aches and pains in the beginning of pregnancy right? Unfortunately within a few days this pain escalated into a driving force that began in her vulva and shot like a bolt of knife-like lighting strait into her a**hole. The sensation left only a lingering feeling of disbelief.

Disbelief, and the all too sudden knowledge that this pregnancy thing was not going to be all rainbows and lollipops as she had ardently hoped.

After the awkward stint of sitting in crowded places with unordinary vaginal behaviour, came the flatulence.

This posed yet another problem. Not only was the woman constantly on the lookout when secretly expelling her reeking vapour, but her bedroom life had been diminishing quickly after the accidental 'Dutch Oven’ episode.

And then there was the ill-fated moment when she believed she was letting out an innocent lady-like fluff and seconds later felt a torrent of poop running down her pajama pant leg.

It was unpleasant, to say the least.   

It wasn't until around week 24 when she attempted to shave her nether regions and realized how horrendous she had let this once beautifully manicured place become. Now it resembled some sort of bush monster. Reminiscent of a drunken homeless man's beard with unidentifiable flakes peppering the outskirts of the unkempt area.

So the mirror came out and with an unsteady hand she began her shearing. By the end, the bush monster had been tamed. Albeit not as pretty as it once was- the woman realized ‘them’s the ropes’ when it came to pregnancy.

The bloat and the swollen feet were one thing. But the fact that the heartburn was so excruciating during sex seemed like a cruel joke since this pregnancy had only upped her sex drive ten-fold. It seemed as though the misery would never end.

However none of these things were as bad as the complete and utter loss of decorum that incurred each time she visited the doctor.

Whether it be, an intern checking her every crack and crevice with an audience of at least ten others cheering him on… To having to tell the receptionist, the nurse and then the doctor that her hemorrhoids were acting up again- and is it normal for them to burn so much?

When finally doing her diabetes testing, she was sure the results would come out positive as her weight gain was so phenomenal it even astounded her. Sugar was her friend, at that point, due to her ghastly behavior in which she whole heartedly blamed on hormones, sugar was her only friend.

But a good friend.

And fortunately a friend who luckily didn't screw with her blood sugar levels too much.

Every day the woman would set aside 20 minutes of her time to do her kegel exercises, all the while wondering if the 'experts' were just pulling her leg. How could this little exercise help her vagina bounce back from being the size of a cantaloupe? It was against the laws of physics, not to mention the most frightening of mental images.

If the woman had thought that the visits to the doctor's office had been demoralizing, any ounce of dignity she had left was gone once being admitted into the delivery wing of the hospital.

There she lay, all 220 pounds of her.

She found relief when bouncing on the large rubber exercise ball that was in the room. Whilst holding her husband's hand and her bare cellulite-y butt facing the open door for any passer-by to see.

Oh how she wanted it to be over. Not just the labour, not just the pain- the whole lot of it! The little quirks of pregnancy that no one ever tells you about. The embarrassing moments, which simply cannot be avoided.

There is no denying that pregnancy and labour are a truly humbling experience.

And then after some odd hours of labouring, screaming, crying and spewing death threats at random nurses…Not to mention pooping an extraordinary amount on the delivery table; there came a baby.

A baby that did not completely diminish the pain, a baby that did not erase the woes of pregnancy, but a baby that allowed the woman to understand why she had gone through it all.

And why, she just may do it again one day.