Reflecting on my pregnancy experience

Pregnancy is a unique time in a person’s life, and it certainly hasn’t been quite as I expected. I’ve been lucky to have a low-risk and uneventful pregnancy, but even with that there have been some things that threw me for a loop. To balance, there have been some things I thought would bother me that just haven’t been an issue at all. Have a read of the first part of this series (found here) for some initial reflections, and read on for some further thoughts!

Today’s post is a little bit of an ‘other people’ special, with reflections on how people behaved around me during my pregnancy, what struck me, what I really appreciated, and what I didn’t so much. I’m sure a lot of this will be familiar to anyone who has gone through pregnancy – please feel free to vent and share your experiences in the commets!

Disclaimer: Needless to say, I am not a medical professional, and nothing in this post should be taken as medical advice. If you’re feeling concerned about anything you’re going through, consult with your medical team.

Bump touching

There are a lot of horror stories around ‘bump touchers’, unsolicited advice, and general weirdness from other people when you’re pregnant. I’ve had a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to general ‘interference’ from other people. However I’ve luckily managed to avoid people touching my bump without asking. Although this is likely because I’ve mostly been working from home! When I have gone into work, people have been very respectful of my physical space and body boundaries. Some people have asked to touch my bump, but very few people have touched it without checking first. This has been a real relief – as it was one thing that made me a bit nervous about being out and about when pregnant.

‘Reassurance’

In terms of advice and opinions, things have been a bit sketchier. It all comes from people being interested and excited for you, but it can be quite hard to deal with everyone telling you things about how you should be feeling, what you should be doing, what you’re going to experience, etc. A common complaint among pregnant people is the ‘just you wait’ brigade. The people who say things like ‘if you think you’re tired now just wait until the baby comes!’. I think this is supposed to be comforting in a kind of ‘count your blessings’ way, but when you’re struggling, exhausted and emotionally drained, being told that the reward waiting for you is to feel even worse is not particularly reassuring! Similarly things like ‘it’s just getting you used to how it will be with a baby’ aren’t particularly comforting. I think what you, or at least I, really need was more along the lines of condolences (!): ‘what you’re experiencing sucks’, paired with reassurances that there is light at the end of the tunnel! What I expected to hear more was people saying ‘it’ll all be worth it’. Maybe I would have found this annoying in a different way, but some reminders that this is all for a good cause would have been great. I should note that I’m very grateful that my partner was the exception to all of these complaints – he’s been very reassuring, comforting and generally fantastically helpful throughout, which I know I certainly can’t take for granted.

Advice

Unsolicited advice is another common trope of the pregnancy experience, and one I haven’t escaped. Again, this all comes from a place of people caring and wanting to help, but it often ends up being counter-productive. I have received some pieces of advice that seem universal (have lots of burp cloths!), but in terms of the pregnancy itself, I’ve also received a lot of directly conflicting advice. One person will tell you one thing, then another will tell you exactly the opposite. My takeaway from this is that pregnancy is, of course, deeply personal and individual. What works for one person may be useless for someone else, and all of our bodies respond to things in different and often unpredictable ways. The advice people receive from their own medical professionals will be tailored to them, and may be impacted by their location, when they were pregnant, their heritage, what facilities were available to them, etc. So I basically landed on a policy that the only advice I’m taking is that given to me by my doctor and midwife team. They know exactly what’s going on with my body and my baby, my circumstances, my medical history, what options I can access, and so on.

There are of course both historic and ongoing reasons why you might not feel entirely safe with your medical team – particularly if you’re a person of colour or member of a marginalised community. It is well-documented for instance that health outcomes and even birth mortality rates are much worse for black women than white women. This can’t be dismissed, and is just one of the many ways systemic and individual level racism continues to have a devastating impact. As a white middle class women, I have not had to navigate the extra complexities this experience brings to pregnancy. I have felt pretty confident and trusting of my midwife team throughout. In this I’d really recommend trying to follow your gut. Ask lots of questions, be open about what and how you’re feeling, and if someone feels suss, try to seek alternatives. It’s deeply unfair that this is something people even have to consider, but you should be able to put yourself and your experiences first, and ensure you’re comfortable. Everyone has the right to feel safe and secure, especially at a time when you’re already feeling vulnerable.

Bump verdicts

Something I didn’t expect to feel during pregnancy was anxiety about the size of my bump. It felt like nothing was happening for absolutely ages, and when it did I couldn’t tell if it was real or just more bloating (see part one for more on that joy!). One of the things I just can’t emphasise enough about being pregnant (for me) is the fear/anxiety of not really knowing what’s going on inside there. Is it moving enough, is it growing enough, is it in the right place? For first time parents, at least at my hospital, the practice is to have a higher number of ultrasounds to track the baby’s growth and development. One of the ways this was explained to me was that you haven’t yet ‘proven’ that you can grow a baby normally (they don’t check as much if you’re having a second baby and your first was ‘normal’). I loved having so many opportunities to see the baby, and the reassurance of knowing it was all going ok, but it did come with those pre-scan nerves of ‘what if it isn’t?’.

So having almost everyone you speak to comment and pass judgement on the size of your bump is not very helpful! ‘Oh, you’re still so small!’, ‘you’re hiding it well!’, ‘gosh, it’s really growing!’. Personally I’d rather have been told that it was super obvious, paranoid as I was about its growth. But having a ‘too big’ baby is also a bad thing, supposedly increasing your chances of needing a caesarean. All these comments and others like them obviously come from a good place – people are to some extent telling you what they think you want to hear. But I think what I’d rather have heard was how healthy it must be, that it’s ‘coming along nicely’ – basically anything that didn’t get me thinking about whether there was a problem. I may have escaped bump touchers, but people feel very comfortable commenting on your pregnant belly/body, in a way they (hopefully!) never would about your non-pregnant belly/body. I can’t say I really found a way to deal with these comments, they touched too sensitive a nerve for me to totally brush them off. I think the closest I got was to joke back ‘it doesn’t feel small!’, although that opens you up to more ‘just you wait’ comments. Ultimately, I just leant on my midwife team, who regularly checked and assured me that throughout my pregnancy, my baby was healthy and growing well.

Being cut some slack

I realise that this post was leaning a bit to the negative, so I wanted to give some balance with one of the ways people have made my experience a really positive one. That’s simply by being kind and understanding. In both my personal and professional lives people have been really understanding that I just might not be up for everything that I was before, and I might not be able to manage as much. I was quite hung-up on not wanting being pregnant to impact my performance, particularly at work. But it’s just not possible to get through pregnancy without admitting that it’s happening to you. My blessed lack of major morning sickness (see Part 1) meant I kept working as normal for longer, but it got to the point where my back hurt so much I just couldn’t handle sitting at a desk, and would need to take a lie down. It may be because I work in the relatively cosy world of not-for-profits, in a mostly female organisation, but the understanding my colleagues have offered has been such a game changer. The difference it makes when people give you permission, literally and metaphorically, to look after yourself is incredible, and I’m so grateful to have just a kind work environment – something many parents don’t have the benefit of. If you’re working with, friends or family of a pregnant person, remember the pressure they might be feeling to act ‘normal’, and let them know they can cut themselves some slack. That you’re not going to judge them for making necessary adaptations to a life-changing physical experience. They’ll probably thank you profusely, sigh with relief, cancel all their plans, and go to bed!

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There’s so much to say about the pregnancy experience that there’ll definitely be a part three of this series! I hope this part has been interesting and in some way helpful if you or someone you know is going through a pregnancy. Do my experiences ring true for you? Have you had a radically different experience? I’d love to hear, so please do share in a comment if you’re comfortable to. Thanks very much for reading!