On The Hazards of Writing While Pregnant

Or, “I’m Sorry About All This”

I was just starting to fit back into my almost all of my pre-pregnancy wardrobe. We were planning to take the honeymoon trip to Hawaii that my husband couldn’t get the time off for when we got married. Not one but BOTH pieces I submitted were accepted for publication. I could officially call myself a freelance writer … the sky was the limit and all that.

Then, life happened. And by “life”, I mean “pregnancy”.

Yes, three and a half weeks ago, we found out that what we are going to be doing this year is having baby number two.

Morning sickness hit, right on schedule, between week 5 and 6.

A few days later, I lost my taste for coffee. I don’t mean I just lost my taste for it, I mean I came downstairs one morning and the smell of it brewing sent me into dry heaves. Coffee is dead to me. Have you seen me write without coffee? No, you haven’t, because frankly it’s incoherent cow manure and I don’t publish it.

After a few days of nausea and no caffeine, I lost my will to live. I expect I will see that again sometime between week 13 and 16.

I wrote a piece last month about the day we ran out of coffee. First-trimester pregnancy is a little like that, only substitute nausea for headache.

My mental state is about on the level of a baboon who’s just had its wisdom teeth removed.

Emotionally, I feel dead except when something (most recently, Toy Story 2) makes me weep uncontrollably.

I had nightmares last week about the raw ground beef I had been putting off cooking until the last minute.

I sit down to write, type something, and then look blankly at it, wondering, “Is that really a sentence? Is it English, even?”

Pregnancy is so worth it. I look at my now one-year-old daughter, crunching away on toast and eggs as I write this, and remember that. But it is no picnic, you guys. It’s something hard that we do for someone that we don’t even know yet, but have to take on faith that we will deeply, deeply love.

So friends: for what I write in the next month or two, I apologize in advance. I know I’ve got to keep writing or I may not come back to it, but who knows what kind of lunacy will be coming out of my keyboard as I get through the first trimester and beyond. I will probably sound like a whiny jerk, mostly. Here’s hoping for a second trimester filled with candy-canes, unicorns, and perspective.