During my last pregnancy, I was literally too sick to register the multitude of typical but 'lesser' pregnancy aches and pains as annoyances. I remember the nausea, the barfing, the reflux and the no-eating with a small side of posterior pelvic pain, which I think I only registered because it felt like someone was impaling me through the ass with every step I took. Due to the lack of nutrition and severe anemia, I was tired, slow weight-gaining and miserable. I was also pregnant through fall/winter/spring, giving birth in early summer.
This time around, things are quite different. I still have consistent digestive *issues* but NOTHING like last time. I am slowly but steadily gaining weight this pregnancy and I will be pregnant (in my last trimester, gah help me) throughout the summer. As a result, I am more *tuned in* to the kind of physical discomfort that oft heard tale of the first time around.
Plus, there's this:
I feel Big.
I feel so big now that, as I enter my third trimester (already!) I am wondering how it's possible that the Biggest three months are still ahead of me. I have to scoot sideways in bed before I roll myself over and get up. I have to make room for my belly when I lean forward. I stand so far away from the sink when washing dishes, that I bend from the waist and rest on my elbows. I lumber upstairs, slowly, and sit down to catch my breath when I get there. It is wearing on me.
And lest you think that I am [complaining about this] writing this out of concern for my current (or post-partum) waist line, fear not. I am relatively unconcerned with the actual numbers on the scale or the way I look. (At least so far.) The sensation of being Big and the labored, physical maneuvering that I employ to move around conjure for me an all-together different type of discomfort. It is a re-enactment, very familiar. For years and years I awkwardly watched that kind of maneuvering, adjusting and compensating from the sidelines.
It is how my mother lived her everyday life.
My mother was a Big person, in every sense of the word but it was her physical bigness that drew strangers' attention. As I imagine that it is with obesity in general, I watched as my mother grew out of her individuality and into 'The Fat Lady' in the eyes of strangers. She became invisible to them. And then, as she kept gaining into the territory of morbid obesity, there came a (very sharp) point in time when she became visible again. I can't adequately describe the painfulness of the experience of standing across a crowded restaurant lobby, watching one adult nudge her companion and then nod in the direction of your mother, making a face that should be reserved for the occasion of realizing that you just stepped into a pile of dog shit with your bare foot. It is one of a hundred painful memories that I don't like to think about.
Watching her struggle with her weight, not just emotionally but also physically took up such an enormous part of my core being that when she died and that died along with her, it left me feeling lighter. Like I could breathe deeply for the first time in a long time. Gone was the (unrealized but perseverative) worry that she would be incapacitated and that we wouldn't be able to care for her at home. Gone were the restrictions, the inconveniences, the awkward situations. The pain, the awful, chronic, throbbing pain that I felt for her, for us, when we were together. And although it was and still is desperately hard to let go of my mother, letting go of all of that other stuff proved a much easier task.
*Poof*
Gone.
I believe that my mother's issues and struggles with her weight (which were a portion of the sum of her issues and struggles in general) affected me and my attitudes and ideas from the earliest possible time. I could probably write a memoir. If I actually liked to remember this shit. Maybe one day. But not now. I've worked through a lot and like I said, letting it go wasn't all that hard.
Until now.
Now, I have these unbidden and uninvited images flashing from wherever it is that I stuffed them, right on into my consciousness. An unforeseen side effect of pregnancy.
Like the posterior pelvic pain isn't enough.
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Guys, I'm turning off the comments because it's all too...I don't know. Full of awk and ick. If you are so inclined, you are welcome to email me...I don't mind hearing what you have to say or having a discussion about it, I just don't want you to feel obligated to say something here, in the comments.
