9 Weeks

Oh boy, nine weeks has a serious feel to it. A heavy, sickening, overwhelming feel.

It includes nausea that has extended beyond my mornings into my early evenings and well into my late nights. It includes fatigue that hangs on all of my muscles, pulls my limbs to the ground, and sits right on my eyelids. It includes a post-meal exhaustion that rolls over me like a tsunami wave and then rolls off a half hour later. It includes alternating constipation and diarrhea, and the most foul flatulence I've ever known a human to produce. It includes bloating that convinces me that I could easier roll around than walk. It includes the need to run to the toilet at least twice every night, clutching my sore breasts with one arm and holding my bladder in with the other. It includes the biggest breakout of acne that my forehead has seen since I was 14. It includes intense aversions to random smells--foods that are salty smell sweet and vice versa. It also includes cravings of foods I don't eat often or haven't in ages: pizza covered in mushrooms and Apple Jacks cereal. It includes an insatiable hunger that somehow sticks around long past the end of a meal. It includes dizziness, occasional loss of balance, and mixed up depth perception that makes going down the stairs a thoughtful exercise. It includes being on the verge of huge tugboat tears daily at the sound or thought of sad news, even for strangers.

Apparently, all of this, is either caused or affected in some way by the great amount of hormones swirling around inside right now. Soon enough, though, my body will get used to this roller coaster ride (please by week 12? hm, week 14 might be more likely). That's the peace I hear the second trimester brings. I can't wait!

But nine weeks also includes excitement at the notice of every new change, a race to the second trimester and even more confidence that this will be a healthy pregnancy with a beautiful, healthy baby at the end of it all. It includes greater freedom in looking, feeling, and being pregnant. It includes less obsessive reading about miscarriage stories, and more reading about the changing paradigm: from person to parent. From one to two to three. From just me to us, ours, we're pregnant, we're a family, it's all right here, around the corner, really not too far from nine weeks at all.