Ida Tin’s “Dear Men” Series: Part 13 of 29 – Pregnancy

Dear Men, this is post 13, on pregnancy, in the series about what it feels like have a woman’s body.

Pregnancy starts with a hunch. Maybe. We don’t know the moment we become pregnant – though we do know when we might have become pregnant!

And then at some point the period doesn’t come, and maybe the body starts feeling different. I got car sick riding a motorcycle, for instance. Something which doesn’t happen. And it also wasn’t the road’s curves that made me sick, it was my hormonal curves (progesterone) going off the charts and morning sickness (which by the way often lasts all day).

I knew I was pregnant when two lines on a test told me. I guess most women are told the news by this piece of plastic. The first two times I found out I was pregnant, I was in a public bathroom somewhere.

The body goes through a totally wild process. The uterus is the part of a human body that can transform the most. From fist sized to humongous and back again. Even our feet tend to go a size up (joints get looser). I can’t even begin to list all the expected and weird bodily experiences women have: cravings, the pregnancy glow, skin changes, mood, aches and an unexplainable ability to guess the gender of the baby (research has shown a 75% score) and on top of that the risk of pregnancy diabetes, preeclampsia and a myriad of other scary things that can happen to the mother.

Being pregnant is also a time of preparation. To the home maybe, to your identity, to giving birth. When I was pregnant with my first (not counting the two times I am pretty sure I was pregnant but had spontaneous abortions and my actual abortion) I did a birth preparation course focused on breathing. I swam 1 km every other day, ate zero sugar and lots of fish. I was tuned into my changing body, and pregnancy took a lot of mental space. Four years later when I was pregnant with my daughter I ran a startup, had a toddler, lived in a new country where I didn’t speak the language. I worked till the Friday before my planned c-section on Monday. Pregnancy had had to be almost unnoticed by myself, the world and also by my partner it felt like. I would have done this differently today, but that was how it went.

I have had easy pregnancies, and have liked seeing my belly grow and feel life inside. For others it’s hell. Physically and emotionally.

It’s nice when people give you their bus seat when you’re visibly pregnant but I needed it when I was so sick in the beginning. The world could just always assume a woman might be pregnant and know that she is vulnerable to chemicals, heat, emotional and economic distress and remember that when we build the world… and once she has a kid by the hand know that she has gone through the wildest thing.

-This post by Ida Tin is shared on LinkedIn and is republished here with her permission. The SheSight Team has not made any changes to the content.