Things They Don’t Tell You About Pregnancy – Part 1

I always joked I’d write a book about this but for now, a series of blog posts will have to do!

In this post I’m going to be sharing with you some of the weird and wonderful – and not so wonderful – things they don’t tell you about pregnancy.

I’ll start with a little disclaimer. I had a pretty rough pregnancy; I was a walking pregnancy cliche. If there was a pregnancy symptom, I had it. So if you’re you’re looking for a fluffy post about pregnancy glows and sailing through with no sickness, this is probably not the article for you. It’s not all bad, I definitely don’t want to scare anyone so there are plenty of funny and nice things they don’t tell you – I think!

There seems to be so much that they don’t tell you about pregnancy. It’s like it’s all a secret or something. So I’m going to share with you all of the things that took me by surprise. A lot of these things are like little insignificant things in movies and TV shows, or just mentioned in passing by pregnant women or when you Google it. But when you experience them – wow.

We’ll start with that famous pregnancy glow. I did not glow. I don’t know what the opposite to glowing is, but that was me. I had dandruff and really dry skin that I wanted to rip off. I’d moisturise it, and five minutes later, it was dry and scaly again. It was worse during the first trimester, but lasted through the whole of my pregnancy, and even now at 19 months  postpartum, my skin is still much drier than it used to be.

How difficult it is to keep quiet. We decided that we weren’t going to tell anyone about the pregnancy until we’d had the twelve week scan, and had seen for ourselves that there was actually a baby. But no one tells how hard it is to not say anything. We went into the first lockdown when I was nine weeks pregnant, which took away that overwhelming urge to tell everyone our amazing news, but it also meant that we didn’t actually get to tell anyone in person, which was a massive disappointment.

Morning sickness. I don’t know who cam upe with the term ‘morning sickness’ but they had obviously never actually experienced it. First thing in the morning was the only tine of day that I didn’t feel sick. I was sick at least three times a day, and usually more like five times a day, from 5-35 weeks. I had a two week break around 18 weeks pregnant, and then it came back with a vengeance. 

I also suffered with food reflux (more about that later), and actually ended up on various different medications to try and stop the sickness. I had tried every sickness remedy you can think of, and absolutely nothing worked for me.

Cravings. I just assumed that cravings were something that everyone got, and was kind of looking forward to laughing about weird cravings. I did not have a single craving; in fact, I just wanted to be able to eat something which would actually stay down!

People feel like they can comment on things that they wouldn’t normally dream of asking about.They really do ask you things like “was it planned?” and “how long did it take?” without even realising that they’re actually asking about your sex life. I mean, you wouldn’t just ask a co-worker how often they have sex now, would you? They also feel like its acceptable to say “You’re looking big” – it seems like when you’re pregnant, anyone can comment on your appearance and it’s perfectly acceptable!

Emotions.Your hear a lot about how your hormones are all over the place, and you’ll probably be over-emotional. I didn’t particularly find this; I think I was so ill all the time that I didn’t have the energy to be! I remember having days where I did feel teary for no apparent reason, but other than that, my emotions were pretty normal.

Pregnancy anxiety. This one is something that I hadn’t really heard of and definitely wasn’t expecting. From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I couldn’t stop thinking about miscarriage risks, to the point that I found an online statistics chart, which showed the likelihood of miscarriage per day. It definitely wasn’t healthy behaviour, but I took comfort in seeing those numbers go down every day. 

It was also when I first started noticing intrusive thoughts; I remember walking along the pavement and thinking ‘what if I fall in the road in front of this car, and get run over’. Intrusive thoughts seem to be a big part of pregnancy nd being a parent, but it’s another one of those things that we don’t talk about enough.

We can’t talk about pregnancy without talking about boobs! My first indication that I was pregnant was when my nipples started really hurting and the veins on my boobs became more obvious. I was looking at pictures of me in a bikini, comparing the veins, as early as 8 days before my period was due. Throughout my entire pregnancy my nipples felt like they were burning, and they go, along with your areola, about 10 shades darker than they normally are!

Your sense of small changes massively. In the first trimester, things that I couldn’t normally smell or didn’t usually bother were quite frankly disgusting. I had to clean our fridge out numerous times and throw sway all the food in it because of a horrendous smell that hit me in the face every tine `I opened the door, and every soft furnishing in our living room scrubbed numerous tines because `I thought it smelled awful. And let’s not forget the dog. I couldn’t have Jessie anywhere near me for the whole of that first trimester and I still don’t think she’s forgiven me.

Even though I could smell everything, I also had the ‘pregnancy cold’. I had a blocked but runny nose for most of the pregnancy, and obviously you can’t take the majority of cold products when you’re pregnant. I spent around 34 weeks drowning myself with a nasal saline spray which barely did anything to help!