Pregnancy notes

I saved a draft on Keep about my first trimester—and how much I hated it. But here are all my thoughts and experiences on pregnancy so far.

As with most of my posts, I don’t really know how to end it, so I’ll just drop my notes here and that’s is.

The earliest days

• I found out at three weeks and five days. Basically, the first day of your period or the earliest day that you can take a pregnancy test. I wasn’t eager—I was just having a good morning and saw my period tracking app indicate it’s a day to test.
• My earliest symptoms were my right eyelid twitching like mad for a few days, for no apparent reason. In hindsight, I also felt like my food tasted salty out of nowhere.
• It was surreal, seeing the positive test. You don’t believe it. You take it with a grain of salt, because you’re a clever person who is aware of false positives. You take a second test the next day, and a digital test the third day. All positive. But you’ve read about chemical pregnancies, so you don’t believe it until a blood test confirms it.
• The blood test comes out positive. Your GP congratulates you. But you and your husband still can’t accept it. You’ve read about early miscarriages and blighted ovums, after all. Not to mention ectopic pregnancies.
• Our first glimpse of our son was when he was just a fuzzy thing on the screen with a heartbeat, at week six, well back in November. Ben and I were both crying and holding hands in the half-light of the ultrasound room. We could finally embrace it. We were expecting.

The horrible first trimester

• How my days felt like: sleep for 10–12 hours a night and still wake up feeling bloated and hungover. And that’s before the nausea kicks in. You have no appetite regardless.
• There’s zero desire to eat. You don’t want to eat because you have no desire to eat. A lot of things smell like they’ll make you sick. You force yourself to eat tiny bits of food. Because you barely eat, you feel like sh-t for most of the day.
• They call it the first trimester fatigue. I call it existential tiredness, not because the tiredness made me existential, but because I didn’t expect it to turn me into a person I didn’t recognise. I felt robbed of the person that I was. I had no energy for anything—chores, work, socialising, or even self-care. I looked and felt unkempt. In a counselling session, I told my psych that I felt like a pathetic piece of sh-t who’s let herself go, because I’ve become a dead weight to my husband in terms of household chores and the mental load of things. She cautioned me to avoid that kind of self-talk as it tended to become self-fulfilling.
• Looking at posts from r/pregnant and r/babyBumps, they contrast pregnancy tiredness to newborn tiredness thus: the former feels like the tiredness and lack of energy from when you have the flu. The latter, after you’ve pulled an all-nighter. I might eat these words, but as someone who deals with occasional insomnia pre-pregnancy, I think I can manage the latter better.
• Pregnancy glow, where? Early on I was very cautious and stopped my full skincare routine, as many products are contraindicated, if not unproven, for pregnancy:
  • Salicylic acid — in my wash and one of my actives (I use what is possibly the mildest BHA active on the market)
  • Retinoids — again, possibly the mildest known form of retinoic acid. Retinoids are a huge no-no in pregnancy.
  • Benzoyl peroxide — rarely used, but still, couldn’t use it to dry out cystic acne
  • Topical clindamycin — used only for my backne. I hope I don’t make it sound like I pile on all of these products on my face every night! That is not the case. Still, stripping down my routine completely changed my skin.
• Needless to say, my skin broke out like crazy: new waves of whiteheads and pustules appearing and disappearing every single day. I had no energy to put makeup on unless I knew I had to show my face on work calls. I had no energy to remove my makeup, or shower, or brush my teeth most nights. Like I said, existential tiredness. Or maybe just good ol’ depression. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Never mind food cravings. People should talk more about food aversions. That’s what most women go through.

Food aversions, pregnancy nose, and sensitivity

• I was losing my sh-it and getting depressed because I told Ben that our couch smelled awful. He didn’t understand what I meant. It took me a few days to realise that it was the Glade plugin that I was smelling, which we had bought a week back. The smell made me sick and gave me a headache. One day, I was in a foul mood and told Ben, ‘I f–king hate that smell. I won’t stand for it. I don’t want to ever smell it again.’ It was a bit extra, but I was overwhelmed.
• ‘We are living in filth!’ The summer months made our cats shed like there was no tomorrow. It was all over our couch. It was all over out clothes. It was all over my hands. The muggy heat and my nausea didn’t help. I was despondently sinking in our fur-covered couch, thinking on the beautiful, fur-free, not-filthy, not-nauseated life I used to live and take for granted.
• The food aversions were intense.
  • There’s an array of breaded chicken products (think schnitzel, ribs, lollipops, kiev) that we would reliably buy from Vic Market as part of our dinner rotation. I could not stand the smell. I would rather starve than eat those. The thought of eating them made me grimace. I’m still not ready to go back to them even today.
  • One night I was sobbing to Ben because I told him that I really, really didn’t want to eat the lamb midloin we had for dinner.
  • Pork and beef were also off the table. Ben figured out that apparently I just hated all red meat during the first trimester.
  • I went full Asian. I only worked up an appetite if I was eating Chinese fried rice. Scrambled eggs on rice. Hotsilog. Bacsilog. Looking back, the only time I could really eat a heavy meal was when I was making myself corned beef silog. I could eat two cups of rice when it was that.
  • Towards the end of the first trimester, there were nights where the only thing I could think of eating was chicken congee. We had to UberEats the only Chinese restaurant that offered congee, 10 kilometres away. The second time we ordered in, I fished out all of the chicken bits from the congee because I didn’t want to eat them.
  • Needless to say, our shared healthy dinner routine broke down. We stopped shopping for fresh produce—all vegetables would go bad in our fridge. I ate a lot of Maccas for lunch and even dinner. Pizzas. Ben regressed to the staples of his youth—instant noodles, canned spaghetti, takeaways… This lasted the entire first trimester.
  • I expected myself to turn to ramen and instant noodles for comfort, but I avoided even these. The thought of sodium, a belly full of broth, and some greasiness turned me away.
• My appetite was shot. I didn’t think it’d happen to me, the food gremlin who lives to eat and has an emotional relationship with food. There was no real pleasure in eating, and I never felt hungry, ravenous, or famished. I just knew that I needed to eat to maintain my energy and not feel like sh-t. I could look forward to a meal, remembering how good it is, but the actual eating is meh. And I felt like my stomach shrunk to the size of five tablespoonfuls of food.
• The craziest bit—water aversion. Apparently it’s more common than you think, because my coworkers confirmed they had it too. Basically, you don’t want to drink water, because it makes you queasy. I could only drink if the drink was fizzy, or very cold. Even then, I would eventually feel queasy from my drink of choice, so I cycled through iced teas, zero-sugar fizzies, and Bundaberg fizzy fruit drinks that had 43 grams of added sugar per bottle. It was unhealthy. I even had aversion to coffee, the very same beverage I have loved and drunk nearly every day since uni.
• After all is said and done, I feel like I’m still one of the luckier ones. I’ve had friends and coworkers who constantly had vomiting episodes in the first trimester, one of them going through vomiting episodes throughout her entire pregnancy. Mine was just a horrible six or so weeks where I just hated my life.

The second trimester

• A lot of the excitement has died down, but so has the anxiety. My belly has grown into a proper pregnant woman’s belly. At the 13-week scan in January, we got a good glimpse of the outline of our baby’s face. A week later, we found out we were having a boy. We’ll see him again in good detail at the 21-week scan.
• Both me and the baby are in good health. Nothing remarkable coming out of tests. I had my glucose tolerance test early, due to a family history of diabetes, but I haven’t discussed the results yet with my OB.
• In the new year, around week 14, it was like a switched turned on, and I found myself vacuuming, gardening, doing the laundry, and cleaning the kitchen all in one morning. My energy came back, and so did my appetite.
• My stomach is shrinking though, on accunt of my growing uterus. It takes less to get me full, and it takes longer between meals for me to feel properly hungry again.
• As I write this, I am halfway through my pregnancy, and pushing 150 lbs. I started my pregnancy already overweight, at 137 lbs. Following medical guidelines, I should reach at least 155 lbs, and top out at 160 lbs. Despite all my complaints about the first trimester, I did gain weight steadily and consistently. My iron levels have been fantastic since the last test.

Preparation and general things

• Ben has been an absolute champion at preparing for fatherhood. I’m not even exaggerating—he almost singlehandedly took on a mental load of all the appointments, preparations, tasks, and checklists we needed to be mindful of. Doctor’s appointments. Prenatal tests. Applying for daycares as early as now. Antenatal classes. Income and leave considerations for both of us at work. Big-ticket baby items that we need to buy, already researched and budgeted for. We will probably not need to buy a lot of baby clothes, as two sets of couple-friends who became parents ahead of us have been ready to hand down their baby clothes and other resources already outgrown.
• The first trimester was lonely, mostly because we kept the pregnancy secret, at least until we got past the NIPT and nuchal scan. Aferwards, it’s been a joy to share my experience with family and coworkers who are also currently pregnant. It’s been fun and rewarding to share my day-to-day, worries, and questions with my mom and sisters, my mother-in-law and stepmother, all who’ve been through this same journey before. I feel blessed.
• I used to think I would have a glam pregnancy; that is, the on-top-of-things, fit, healthy pregnancies I watched through my favourite influencers on YouTube and Instagram. Of course they wouldn’t show the unpleasant aspects, even though they candidly talk about it. Strength training is the last thing on my mind right now. I just try to keep my steps up, although these days I waddle and walk like a geisha—tiny steps. Since January though our healthy eating habits have returned. Mostly. We always have fruits in the fridge and we’re back to our regular vegetable rotation for dinner.
• I forget how pregnant I look until strangers dote on me. A woman tried to let me go ahead of her in line at a public toilet. An elderly man ushered his partner to ‘let the lady go in first, she needs a seat’ as we boarded the train on a busy Saturday evening (it was during Taylor Swift’s Melbourne leg of her Eras tour). Ben tells me to please lean into this courtesy, as I am pregnant and could use the comforts.
• I also randomly tried a foundation at Sephora a couple weeks ago. I don’t normally try makeup at the counter, but I was at a newly opened Sephora branch to have my routine brow-and-upper-lip wax at Benefit, and noticed that the lighting at Sephora was much better than the lighting at Mecca or Myer. I did not expect a perfect match for the first foundation I picked up—Fenty in 190. I didn’t think that the matte finish would work for my skin texture, but I think it made the overall look more natural. Ben complimented it and said it that the only reason he knew I was wearing foundation was because my cheeks weren’t red, and he said my previous foundation looked obvious in that he knew I painted my face with makeup.
• I swore I wouldn’t be the type of person to buy maternity clothes. The concept was so unnatractive to me. But Ben, being Ben, put me first and drove me to a small boutique I found on Instagram, despite my protests of how ‘it’s not really that important’ and ‘it’s so out of the way, they’re closing soon and we’re out of time’ and ‘I can still fit in my clothes’. He picked out a top and a dress for me, and I got myself two proper maternity skirts that really brought out my belly. It lifted my mood and I wore both skirts on the two Fridays I returned to the city to work in the office. My coworkers said I looked great, that I was glowing. It really meant a lot.
• I also bought a belly butter-and-oil set from a brand that Instagram kept pushing onto me. Happy with it. (If you scroll through the page, you might even spot my review—it’s recent and long.)
• In hindsight, I can’t help but think of how things just aligned. Ben quit drinking and smoking, and I decided to be dutiful with my iron supplements and prenatals (women are encouraged to take zinc and folic acid when they’re trying, and before they’re even pregnant). We got pregnant just two months shy of starting an IUI cycle. Had that been unsuccessful, we were ready to go through IVF. We had already engaged with a clinic and had already signed the consent forms around it. And then we conceived naturally. It blows my mind that my surgery in August ‘cleaned and flushed out’ my womb to unblock it. It’s uncanny, but that’s also the story of a friend, who was told she would never have children. And the commonality we both had was a surgery to address endometriosis.
• Maybe I am having a glam pregnancy, in that I’m seriously enjoying life right now. Every time I’m at mass all I can pray about is thanksgiving for everything Ben and I are experiencing right now. My cup overflows. I’ll do a separate post on how I’m going through Lent this year.