But Everybody ELSE Has an Opinion!

"You better get as much sleep as you can now, because once that baby comes, you won't have any time for yourself/to do anything."

"So do you know if it's a boy or girl? Why aren't you finding out? When you find out it makes shopping easier and people want to know."

"Are you going to take Lamaze classes? I took them and they didn't help at all. It would have been better if I didn't take them. I don't think you should bother."

"Are you taking any preparation classes? Why haven't you started yet? How will you know what to do?"

"Are you having the baby in a public hospital or health center or privately? Where? What doctor? Privately is better because..../Public is better because..."

"So when are you due? What do you mean the doctor gave you more than one due date? That's so weird. So how will you know when the baby's coming?"

"You want a water birth/hypnobirth? *laughs* How will that work out for you? Does anybody even offer that here? Why can't you just do it like everybody else?"

"Do you have your baby bag packed yet? You need a bag for you and the baby packed in case of an emergency and you need to get it done now. When are you going to do it? Why haven't you done it yet? You can't just not do it. You have to do it."

"So did you buy everything you need for the baby yet? Why not? When are you going to do it? You have to start planning. you can't just wait until the baby comes."

"So did you get kicks yet? Oh Braxton Hicks too? Well that's just weird. You're not supposed to have so many symptoms so early on."

"How far along did you say you were? Oh. You're so small. Are you sure? When such and such was pregnant, by this stage she was huge and had such a nice belly."

"How pregnant did you say you were? As in you're three months today or going to be three months tomorrow? So it's officially three months since the date of conception? So it would be three months ago the baby was conceived exact to this date? What do you mean you're not sure? Which is it then?"

"So do you have names yet? What names are you thinking of. Oh that's a nice name. Oh such and such named her daughter/son that name. That's such and such's son/daughter's middle name/second middle name/nickname/friend's name/neighbor's name. You can't use that. Oh that's a horrible name. What on earth made you think of a name like that? How do you spell it? Okay, I'll tell such and such. She's pregnant too you know."

"Did you hear such and such is pregnant? Did you visit her? She might need help with things. Why haven't you gone to help her out around the house or with the kids? But she's pregnant too, she needs help. Well, you need to get over there and help her."

"Oh it's a girl, trust me. With the way you've been throwing up, it will definitely be a girl. I better start looking for some pink!"

"Oh it's a boy, trust me. With the stuff you've been craving, it will definitely be a boy. I better start looking for some blue!"

"So what bottles are you going to buy? What pampers? How many blankets will you buy?"

"Back in my day, I only had two cheap bottles and it worked. You should just look for two cheap bottles and use that. You don't need fancy nipples and all that."

"Make sure you get this type of formula. They don't even need to breastfeed. This formula has everything they need."

"Did you buy a crib yet? You'll need a crib. You should look for one now. Check this store or that store and get one there. Did you buy a rocking chair? You don't need a rocking chair. Don't bother with it. If you want to waste your money, sure, buy it, but you don't need it."

"What are you drinking? Oh no, grapefruit juice is bad for the baby. It just is. You shouldn't drink grapefruit juice. You should only be drinking water."

"Are you drinking water? Well water doesn't have much nutrients. If you aren't drinking juice how do you expect to get nutrients? Prenatals and food aren't enough, you need to drink juice too."

"So are you ready for the baby? You know babies can be born early from 7 months, right? And I saw online/read an article/heard someone say that a baby born at 7 months can live when a baby born at 8 months won't live. It's better to have the baby at 7 months if you're having it early, so try to have it then."

"Are you eating? How often are you eating? 2-3 hours isn't enough. You should be eating a lot of food all the time. Pregnant women need a lot of food. What did you eat today? Well sandwiches aren't good enough. You need to eat some homecooked food. Why aren't you cooking? If you're sick then just hire somebody. If you're not eating homecooked food you'll keep getting sick. You need to eat some snacks to pack on some weight too."

"You should eat lots of condensed milk and ice/chocolate/cake/pastries/meat to put on weight. You're too skinny. You need to weigh more. When I was pregnant I weighed such and such."

"It doesn't matter if meat/orange juice/oily foods make you throw up. That's what I wanted when I was pregnant, so that's what you should be eating/drinking."

"So how come I'm not seeing pictures of your belly on facebook? When are you putting them up? You should put full body pictures so I can see how everything changed. Everybody else does it. Such and such did it. When are you just going to do it already?"




BREATHE. Just breathe. Deep breath in, slowly breathe out. Breathe.

These are all things people have said to me. There's a lot more, but this is what I can remember for now. Some aren't so bad, some will make you scratch your head and wonder. Me? Right now I'm on the verge of tears. I have a million voices in my head repeating these things to me day in and day out. What is my problem? A lot of things. My biggest problem? Everybody else has an opinion. Everybody else but me.

I shouldn't have a problem with that, but I do. I am under the impression that as the person carrying this child in my womb and bearing through these hellish symptoms for 40 weeks, as well as the person expected to push a little human grapefruit-sized head out of a very tiny body part, as well as one of the two people expected to parent/raise this child, that I deserve some level of a say. That's all I want. A say.

I know nobody cares what I think or what I have to say, but what makes everybody else's opinions more valuable than mine when I'm the pregnant soon to be birthing and parenting one here? Not a lot of people talk to me, with family and in-laws from hell and just a handful of friends across the world. But that doesn't stop the family and in-laws from saying inappropriate things when they actually do see/talk to me. Add pregnancy to that, and suddenly everybody else has either written expert books while hiding out in Narnia, or want a gory detailed memoir from you for the sole purpose of judging.

Some people have made their little comments and whatnot unknowingly, and I realize they don't know what to say or how to keep a conversation. They want to talk about the pregnancy/baby and that's what they've heard other people say, so they go with it. I know they have good intentions. I can deal with that.

But the outright judging and laughing in my face and scolding? Seriously? Do I not have enough on my plate? The only person I should be taking orders from is my DOCTOR. You know, the one with the degree and a gazillion years of experience? Yeah. That one. Not the aunt/uncle/cousin/family stranger person with an invisible secret degree from Hogwarts.

It bugged me when I tried to reach out to everyone and announced my pregnancy to the world. I was terrified that I would lose the baby or something would go wrong. It was just earlier this year I had been diagnosed with endo. This pregnancy was not planned and I had no idea how I was going to take care of my sickly self, a husband with heart problems, an unborn baby in my angry uterus, household responsibilities, and the daily crap from Cancer Grump and any other of my family or the in-laws that bring crap to fill my plate. I reached out looking for comfort and support and words of kindness and happiness or something like that, and got nothing. Conversations were cut short, everyone claimed to be busy and would call back (none did) and the first question was "was this planned?" Uh no, it wasn't, and I haven't tried to hide that from anyone, but what difference does that make? Does my baby not deserve love because he/she wasn't scheduled to happen now? "No it wasn't. It's a really big surprise for us" was my response. I was met with disapproving grunts and scoffs as the other person quickly tried to end the call after wanting to know exactly how pregnant I was. The hell?

I had a couple calls returned from an extended family member that stayed with us after Taurus Man's heart attack due to family problems at home she was facing. We were nowhere near emotionally or financially stable enough to take her in, but after claiming to be ready to commit suicide, we agreed to bring her here. During her stay, I think I was a pretty good hostess despite the world crumbling all around me. I cooked, washed, and cleaned as I normally did, but included doing these things for her as well. Despite her asking and insisting she would help, I refused to allow her to lift a finger, with the exception of one night when I asked her to help me wipe down the stove and counter. If I had been treated that way at anyone's house, I would consider it good treatment and try to stay in touch. However, once she left, she thanked us immensely for letting her stay with us and with the exception of these two-three calls, never looked back. These calls were her way to vent about things at home, which I totally understand, and enquire about the pregnancy. By "enquire" what I really mean is pinpoint exactly when Taurus Man and I...well....fused our egg and sperm together. I kid you not. She was hellbent on getting the exact date down. Not for due date purposes, for CONCEPTION purposes. For the date my husband fertilized my egg. She even asked if I could track my date of conception and if it meant we had sex that day or the day before. O.O Am I the only one weirded out by that? DAFUCK MAN? I'm all for curious minds, and while she was here, she defined curious as she asked about losing my virginity to Taurus Man, how often we had sex, and curiouser and curiouser questions. But for real? That's off the che-zain, yo.

A huge problem I have with whether it's unwary or intentional things like this, is the gender thing. Anyone that knows me will know that I do not support gender stereotyping. I hate the whole blue for boy/pink for girl thing so much it makes my blood boil and threaten to explode my veins. I HATE IT. I fucking hate the fucking stereotyping to ridiculous fucking extents. Don't start with me on that. Just don't. Even if I chose to find out the gender, I still would not purchase a single blue or pink thing for my child. Taurus Man and I decided on a soft green and white color theme early on, and no matter how many times we mention it, it goes in one ear and out the other.

I have a buttload of reasons why I don't want to know the gender. Depending on the severity of the endo, this may be my only baby. My symptoms were so severe that I was planning a hysterectomy before I got pregnant and I may very well get one once I can afford to sometime after this baby is born. That will also mean this may be my only baby. Keeping the gender a surprise for the delivery room is known to give the laboring mother an extra incentive to push when she gets too tired. I don't want my fucking baby to be surrounded by fucking gender stereotyping fucking bigots. I am happier not knowing, and I want to stay that way. Not knowing makes this feel like a special surprise/treasure kind of thing, and so far, I love having that feeling and I want it to last. Especially if this is going to be my only baby, I want that feeling. Even if I can have a million kids after this, I want this one to feel this way. Beyond that, I'm the pregnant one, I will be pushing this kid out, and I will be changing diapers and all that. I say so. Isn't that enough?

From what I've researched, no birth is ever exactly like any other. I have the understanding that birth, and everything surrounding it, is very unpredictable. I am the type of person that worries excessively for everything. A pain in the ass Type A personality. I am also a perfectionist, a planner, and someone with all kinds of issues that gets down and discouraged very easily. I am aware that I cannot make a pretty little chart and walk into the delivery room and say "okay, this is how this birth is going to happen. At 2:30, this will happen. That will happen by 3:00 and this will happen by 4:30." I've been researching birth for a long time. I have an idea of how unpredictable this stuff can be. Instead of doing that, I can work on ways to keep myself relaxed throughout this pregnancy and if I can apply any of these methods on the day I deliver, I will. If there are alternatives to epidurals offered to me and I don't have to have back labor, I want those options. I believe that educating myself is the best way to be prepared. I don't want to be in there and the nurses injecting me with things and twisting me into positions I've never heard of and don't understand in a cold, sterile hospital room. You want me to freak out? That's one way to do it. Freaking out will stress me out, which will make me tense up, which according to endo and my Braxton Hicks, makes me feel more pain. So laugh at water births and hypnobirths all you want, but do it when I'm not around. I have enough on my plate to worry about and I'm grasping at straws right now to keep myself together and not freak out about what's happening to my body and what will or may happen during and after delivery.

Whatever my doctor says, I'm cool with it. If I'm not, I tell her that and we work around it. I'm grateful for positive remarks and anyone that wants to help or be helpful, but I don't need to be ordered to do anything I'm not comfortable with. I shouldn't have to worry about if what I say makes people uncomfortable. Nobody seems to be the least bit concerned about what I'm comfortable with. If my doctor says something is okay, as far as I'm concerned, it's okay. If she says something isn't right, then as far as I'm concerned, it isn't right. What you or your friend or your mother or your aunt or your sister did may not be what's right for me. Everyone is different. Bitch.

The reason we haven't gotten baby things yet is because both Taurus Man and I are unemployed. His mother, Cancer Woman, tries to send some money every month for us to buy our medication (we are both on daily prescription meds), go to my doc, and buy a few groceries to last as long as we can stretch it. Not ideal, but we make do. Despite Cancer Grump's wood-workshop downstairs, if Taurus Man wants to build a crib or anything we need, he has to take a lot of verbal abuse and sift through refused termite ridden scrap wood or pay his father for actual wood or order wood from a hardware. Cancer Bitch and her husband get special treatment (whatever they want, whenever they want, always free), but with the way Cancer Grump treats Taurus Man, you'd think Taurus Man was a stray dog and not his own son. Still, we deal.  We can't rearrange the room because the bed that was breaking down got broken down (see one of those previous posts for an explanation...let me know if there's none) and the closet Cancer Woman paid Cancer Grump to build for Taurus Man years and years ago that was built quite crappily needs to be built over so that we can actually store clothes in it (not two pieces of clothes per drawer) and USE it so that we have actual room for things and not heaps of clothes all over the place. We need to build/buy furniture before we move things out to make room for the baby (we basically live in our bedroom) and those things aren't happening right now. I've made back-up plans in case none of these things are done by the time Superbaby is born, so we'll deal with however things go. Right now, though, there's not a lot we're permitted to do. At the end of the day, we still live under Cancer Grump's roof, and that means we live under his rule. He can do things like make messes where I've just cleaned and start a fight with Taurus Man about how I'm not cleaning and I'm making the house look dirty. He can make a mess and use dishes, the stove, microwave, the table, trek muddy footprints in, dust cigarette ashes, dump his prayer ashes in the shower and sink after I've cleaned etc. and sit around bullying me to clean up after him while blaming me and my marriage to Taurus Man for Taurus Man's heart attack. Yes, I've been to counseling and I've been advised to bring social workers to sit down and talk to him, which will make him worse. No he shouldn't treat his sickly, pregnant daughter-in-law and son who had a stress-related heart attack and two operations just months ago this way, but he is the way he is and he's only this way to us. Still, we deal. This is why I was on antidepressants in the first place. For now, I'm doing everything I can to find ways to relax like meditation and water. So hahaha at my interest in water births and hypnobirths and my desire to do things as naturally as I'm allowed, but you know what, it's working for me right now, and I'm not in a mental asylum. As far as I see, these "ridiculously naive" ideas are doing a damned good job at keeping me together. The complications I've had so far are not my fault and I shouldn't be blamed for it. I didn't intend to have the symptoms I've had so far and if my doctor is okay with it, then I'm okay with it. There are things I'm just not comfortable with and I shouldn't be forced to just because someone else did it or someone wants it done that way. I do not treat anyone with such disregard and I deserve at least that much back.

I know nobody will listen to what I have to say and the comments will keep on coming. But if you're reading this, try to have a little understanding the next time you talk to a pregnant woman. Try doing some research or asking other people questions to get an idea what it's like. You think puberty was bad, with your body changing before your very eyes and everybody, dirty old men and nosy ladies alike all staring at your boobs and hips and legs and trying to poke or touch you or ask questions they shouldn't? That's NOTHING compared to pregnancy, but use that as an example of how it feels. You didn't like every aunt and uncle and everyone wanting to know when your period started or what size bra you were wearing or if your hips were coming in or how your legs were shaping up or if you got acne, did you? Remember that when you approach a pregnant woman please. I know some women drink it all up and some will encourage little scandals or give snarky, shocking remarks and so on, but some of us just sit there feeling awkward, not sure how to respond because we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and we were raised not to.