When you get pregnant, people tend to throw around words like “blessing”, “gift”, and “miracle”. It was annoying and even offensive sometimes, but I didn’t let that ruin the awe I was feeling when I was expecting my daughter.
I was in awe of my body and nature. It’s just amazing to feel a tiny person form inside you. Our bodies are capable of some incredible things.
I was in awe of modern medicine. There were some complicated things to consider when we conceived, and although the pregnancy was high risk, everything went smoothly. Everyone was and is healthy. The tests and procedures I went through while pregnant were absolutely fascinating and they kept my baby and myself safe.
I know pregnancy isn’t the right choice for everyone, but I feel really grateful I got to experience it. It has actually made me feel more comfortable in my own skin. My stretch marks are like battle scars — I can wear them with pride because they were a part of my daughter growing in my belly.
Becoming a mother also felt like joining the biggest support group ever. I now have a special connection to all the other moms in my life. Good or bad, we can all relate.
My pregnancy was never a “blessing” or “miracle” and my daughter isn’t a “gift”. Having a baby was an amazing, natural event and I now feel joy watching my daughter grow, learn, and explore.
Let me also take this opportunity to thank my amazing doctors who brought my healthy baby girl into this world. They were knowledgeable and professional. They get the credit — not god.
Has anyone else experienced this? Was your pregnancy a “blessing”?
I doubt that I’m part of your target audience for this question, but for what it’s worth …
Our pregnancies were a careful, choreographed process of searching for and building an close interpersonal relationship with our surrogate and her family, researching for an appropriate egg donor, and engaging some of the best modern medical, legal, and financial services we could find. I doubt it was anyone’s definition of a miracle. But a couple consisting of two men tend to fall outside the expected narrative of childbirth.
Buenas…
My pregnancies were many things, but “miracle” is not on the list. They were mostly anxiety ridden because my very first pregnancy went Wahoonie-shaped at week 10, as they tend to do.
I’m much more in awe at those two amazing people that I actually grew, but maybe that’s because the pregnancies were long ago.
BTW, there’s a comment of yours trapped in our spam filter. I’ll resurrect it tomorrow when I’m at the computer.
Thank you!
Urgs, sorry, it was “I have forgiven Jesus” and I mixed up the two bloggers whose names are phrases. It’s a lovely kid you have, btw. Hope you’re doing ok in these times.
Thank you. We are doing okay. We haven’t killed each other yet.
Hope you are doing okay as well!
Pregnancies can go very, very wrong…and that’s when the pregnant person finds out the incredible bias against pregnant women. The only person on the planet stupider and more frivolous than a teenaged girl, it seems, is a fully-grown woman who just happens to be pregnant.
I nearly died in pregnancy because of a condition that’s in all the “how to be pregnant” books, mentioned in all the classes, etc. When it happened to me, I was told I was “hysterical”, “drug-seeking” or “just wanted to get attention”. I was chastised for supposedly using a tanning bed while pregnant, when in fact that yellow glow came from liver failure…so, yeah, they didn’t notice that my lips and gums and the whites of my eyes were also yellow (or, more likely, jaundice didn’t fit their narrative of “women are frivolous and stupid”, so they ignored it.
It’s two decades later and women are still being treated as disposible walking wombs.
I can’t speak to pregnancy, since I was not (and will never be) able to get pregnant.
The actual childbirth (speaking as a close witness thereof, including catching a baby in the parking lot!) was a crazy, scary ride. Probably more so for me than for the mom-to-be, since she was preoccupied with what she was doing and by the time second stage started, there wasn’t any room in her mind for anxiety.
I wouldn’t call either of my kids a “miracle,” exactly. (Well, the idea that a human being could grow from nothing and then come out of someone’s body like that still kind of blows me away.) However, once I saw them, whether I was holding them or not, they did feel like something immesurably precious — a gift, in a sense, but also very much a huge responsibility. All of a sudden there is this human being in your arms, who is utterly dependent upon you to do the right thing by them. And you know you haven’t the faintest idea what you are doing, and you know how easy it is to screw it up. And you know from being on the receiving end just how awful it can be when a parent screws up.
I remember, when my oldest was about 2 days old, looking at them and saying to them, “I hope I can make your growing up not suck as much as mine did.”