Okay I lied. I said you wouldn’t hear from me until the wall was down but I am chained to my bed and I’m here to complain about it a bit to you nice, sympathetic people. Morning sickness is different for every woman, just like pregnancy and periods are different. When people say ‘play the hand you’re dealt’, I often think of this sort of thing. All of us know all of the cards, but some of us get some and not others, and in a different order.

My friend Kelly got, in my opinion, record breaking heartburn. The nausea was there, but manageable on a full stomach. She just had to eat a little bit all day long and stay distracted. But the heartburn, that was the Get Me the Hell Out of Here card. My friend Kris had gestational diabetes. She could survive completely on oranges and spent more time in the doctor’s office than out. She seemed fine with being pregnant, but below the surface, her body was not as thrilled and often pitched fits and spiked her blood sugar, causing problems. I remember my friend Krystal’s stories about her toddler coming in to see her throwing up in the bathroom. From what I remember, at first he was concerned, and then sympathetic, and later just got used to it and it became normal life. My friend Sarah is a professional pregnant woman and nursing infant mother. She makes it look easy. The most I remember about her first trimesters are her reports of feeling teary and snappy. Toward the end she gets early contractions (not fun) and fatigue all the way up to delivery. Another had migraines, another pre-eclampsia (completely terrifying) and, well, you get the point.

I picture us all around a table sharing our cards: “Heartburn? Me, too! I thought I was going to have to go to six stores to get enough Tums!” We lay them down in order of severity, some with a touch of nausea but a truckload of headaches and cramping. Others win with a flush and say they just can’t imagine doing it again. I have friends who had very mild symptoms and loved being pregnant, and others who barely made it to the finish line, but of course not one of us wouldn’t do it again to have our babies. It’s completely worth it and despite the pain, that’s why perfectly rational women do it again. I could go on about the insane exhiliration of creating a person and how all this pales in comparison to that feeling of accomplishment, love and out and out joy. But that’s not what this post is about.

Apparently, my personal version of “morning sickness” is getting the flu for about ten weeks straight. At five weeks I’m thinking this is going to be easy. I feel a little queasy, a little dizzy, and definitely tired. Basically the Cliff’s Notes of pregnancy. Then week six, everything goes straight to hell in a handbasket. I am seriously living de ja vu with this next little one. Week five, I just need to stay full and distracted, and not ride in a car. Take an extra nap. Week six, I have the flu and it never goes away. Morning to evening, and all night long, I’m just sick. I make myself eat, and make myself drink. I feel better for a few hours, and feel two steps from death for a few hours. Everything is okay UNLESS I am standing up. Then its tick tock until I feel too sick and have to lay down. Clearly this makes bathing sort of difficult. Dealing with food and poop are both really hard. I frighten myself when I look in the mirror. Brushing my teeth often results in retching. It’s just like having the flu, only last time it went on and on. It started lightening up around week 13, more stints of feeling better, for longer. But still every morning I was nauseous until somewhere around week 16, sometimes throwing up without warning. I hit the wall once. I busted up laughing it was so surreal. That really makes you want to go out in public and chance it, right?

I battle my emotions. The other night I spent about an hour crying and hiccuping while I flooded Scott with my heartaches. They are all real and valid and not going anywhere, I usually just don’t feel the need to cry about them. We all have our stuff that’s just the cons of our particular way in life and I’m here to say the pros far outweigh them for me. Usually they are small and shelved and my beautiful life dances on in front of them. But when my hormones rage, they search for and find these perfectly valid reasons to have a complete breakdown. They take these things, perpetually sad things, down off the shelf where I keep them and shake some fists at the universe. I seriously feel like I’m fifteen again and just want to sob, “it’s not fair” over and over. The non-pregnant me would say, “Of course it’s not fair. It just is what it is. Everyone has these battles they fight in life. This isn’t heaven, we are all of us doing the very best we know how to do.” I battle feelings of guilt over being sick. There is some background to this, mainly an ancient history of my body being prone to getting sick when I’m depressed and having to argue with others over whether I was actually sick or just pouting. I have developed this tendency to defend myself or worse, question my abilities to tough it out alone and it just creates useless guilt. I have to shut my mouth when I want to gush to Scott about how much I need this and appreciate this and is he mad at me and all kinds of craziness. This is his kid, too, and it’s temporary. Get yourself together and go to bed.

This time, I’m doing it differently, I told myself. It’s going to be better. I am not going to try to be a hero, I am going to ask my doctor for medicine, and God bless my brilliant husband who went out and hired a sitter for the afternoons so that he could actually keep a job going. I’m going to have my one cup of coffee and savor the extra energy. Well, the medicine didn’t work, and this morning I couldn’t pull it together to even have coffee and needed to be horizontal while our sweet sitter was still in school so Scott came home for two hours to bridge the gap. I left a message for my doctor, and I am hoping he has another anti-nausea med that might work. Although, it’s more than the nausea. It’s the splitting headache, the heartburn, the muscle pain, and skin pain. It’s that all over feeling of wretchedness that for me feels like par for the make-a-baby course. These are my cards. This is the last hand I will be dealt, and we will get through the next six weeks and comical puking shenanigans and it will all be so worth it when this little person arrives on the scene. I will try to resist recounting my tales of woe to them. I resolve to tell them more often how beautiful it was to want them so badly for so long and then have their tiny little selves handed to me. I will tell them how blissful it was to watch them sleep in a bundle next to me in bed, well fed and plump little cheeks fattening up more every day. How they smelled absolutely divine and how their little bird breathing and tiny yawns would leave us all silently captivated. The morning sickness will leave for good but the captivation part never seems to fade.