I said Ouch! This really hurts!

Well, the freaking out has commenced, of course.

I found out about the pregnancy much earlier this time than I did with Nolan (I think - I really can't remember exactly.) I just knew something was up and took the test much earlier, whereas before it was a definite surprise situation. And now since I'm feeling pretty okay and normal, other than some tiredness, I'm starting to worry that something is wrong with this pregnany. People always tell you that if you feel bad (nauseous, exhausted, irritable) when you're in the first trimester it's actually a GOOD thing, because it means the hormones are flowing and your body is doing all the things it's supposed to be doing - building a placenta, storing up energy, et cetera. So of course my emotional brain is ignoring the known fact that it's really early yet and is instead freaking out about the lack of sickness.

In other words, I'm feeling bad because I don't feel bad. Brilliant!

Some couples wait to tell other people that they're pregnant just in case something does go wrong and there's a miscarriage. We tell everybody we know on the theory that, should something go wrong, we'll probably need the support and good wishes of those very same people, so why not blab now? I'm not a very competent secret keeper anyway, and I'm certainly not very good at hiding it when I'm feeling bad (as KB can testify), so why even try?

That's one of the big ironies (or perhaps, to be grammatically correct and not fall into the Alanis trap, one of the paradoxes) of early pregnancy - you feel tremendously crappy, you're constantly exhausted, cranky and nauseous, but you don't LOOK pregnant at all. There is no way for anyone who doesn't already know to tell that you're pregnant, so no one treats you any differently. All you want to do is lie down on the floor and take a nap, but everyone else around you expects you to be acting normally - handling your workload, talking intelligently in meetings, not appearing to fall into a coma periodically.

This drove me crazy early in my pregnancy with Nolan - every workday morning I would walk the mile to the T station and if I failed to get a seat on the train, it was all I could do not to crumple to the sticky floor and weep piteously. But no chivalrous man would give up his seat for me because I didn't look at all pregnant (of course, truth be told, not many men gave up their seats even when I was hugely pregnant - it was mostly sympathetic older women who had obviously been there, done that) and I didn't have the self-possesion to say "I'm pregnant. Please can I sit down?" The time when you really need the break, no one will give it to you.

So that's the reasoning behind my tell-everyone-now strategy: Maybe I'll get some sympathy. It's all about me. (Actually, it might get KB some sympathy, too. Maybe I'll start marketing T-shirts: "I'm in my first trimester. Pity my husband.")

Of course, since I haven't started having any morning sickness yet and am torturing myself with the possibility that I've already miscarried and just haven't realized it, I can now also feel guilty (in this purely hypothetical future situation) for putting everyone on red alert, garnering sympathy and then failing to actually, you know, have a baby.

I can't win.

(Also, in case you didn't know, the reason you get so friggin' tired [besides the fact that you're growing a brand-new entire human being in your body] when you're busy placentasmithing: By the end of pregnancy, the placenta, on average, weighs between 2 and 3 pounds. That might not sound too impressive, but just you try spontaneously generating 3 pounds worth of blood vessels and connective tissue, and see how you fare.)

Thanks for reading.