What it is Like Being Five Months Pregnant!

Five months. Five months ago I was busy getting pregnant. (Yeehaw!) Now, five months later, I am pregnant and strangely happy to be so. I didn't really want to be a mother. I didn't really want to have kids. It was a somewhat firm decision I had made and one I didn't think would be altered quite so suddenly.

Yet here I am, five months pregnant and happy.

That's not to say that being pregnant doesn't freak me out. Because it does. I can now actually feel the baby moving - kicking, punching, dancing, tumbling. On one side, of course, this movement makes me feel all sappy and lovey, but on the other side, it plain creeps me out. I mean, really - there is a separate little person living inside my body, living off of my body, using all of my energy and my nutrients while making me grow in odd proportions. What's not creepy about that? Very much like a parasite, it seems like this separate little person, let's call it SLP, gets the better end of the deal, hands down.

Feeling the movement, well, that's just the beginning. It only gets more bizarre when I actually see SLP move. The short outward kicks and punches that make my stomach shoot out as if an alien were trying to force its way onto Earth via my insides. (We've all seen Alien, and we haven't forgotten!) One afternoon, I watched as my stomach formed a large bulge on the right side while lessening in size on the left. Maybe SLP thought it would be fun to see how far right it could maneuver its body or, even better, how far right it could stretch mama's skin. Maybe this shows prenatal creative thinking - trying to cure the boredom of life in the womb. The next thing I knew, the entire right side of my stomach was morphing into strange shapes and sizes. I sat there in disbelief, waiting for something very ugly to crawl out of my belly button and try to eat my face.

Basically, I feel poked at, prodded, and downright used.

Of course now that I'm in my second trimester, things feel loads better than they did in the beginning. In the beginning, I woke up, already running to the bathroom to vomit practically nothing in the sink because the community-shared commode only made me want to vomit more of practically nothing, no matter how many times I scrubbed it clean. And that's not where the "morning" sickness ended either. My nausea lasted all day, and if I didn't eat what felt like constantly it only worsened, resulting in extreme and unwelcome weight gain. Not to mention the exhaustion that can only be compared to the two months I spent bedridden with mono nucleosis when I was sixteen. At least when I was sixteen I could take two months off of school and sleep twenty hours a day without putting myself in grave danger of not being able to pay my bills, mortgage, etc. Now, at the ripe old age of 26, I can't afford such luxuries and shlepped my way through the days, only half-alive and lacking nearly all of my usual spunk and splendor.

I found it excruciatingly hard to get excited about SLP during those first few months.

I think for obvious reasons.

And yet, here I am - five months pregnant and happy. Considering all of that (insert arrow pointing upward here), what could I possibly be happy about?

Well...SLP, of course.