By Francoise Voldoire
Like countless women before me, I squatted, peed and waited for the 2 red lines. My heart started pounding big time and I could not understand why. Then the 2 lines were obvious. I was pregnant!
From that brief moment, I could not find the words to best describe what I felt. I cried. The reality started to sink in. I wasn’t sure if it was happiness or fear, thinking that finally someone was coming to change my life. I thought I wanted to remain by myself for as long as I could. I wanted to continue to be the kind of fearless person who could pack a bag and get on a plane to a destination I’d never been. I wasn’t sure if I was ready enough to give up on that yet. Hey… someone tiny but powerful to rule my life was coming. I was pregnant!
The climbing started. My pregnancy journey was like our journey climbing the Himalayas in 2018.
The only difference was it wasn’t my husband who was struggling this time. It was mostly me. And no matter how he tried to comfort me, a part of me felt like he didn’t totally understand what I was really feeling.
In contrast, the first few weeks were a walk in the park: like the beginning of every climb.
Yet that fantastic feeling didn’t last long. By 7 weeks, my body started to feel like an alien to me. My own body felt more and more foreign to me with each passing week. And it felt like it wasn’t getting any better no matter how much rest I got. Why did people call it morning sickness when it can happen any time of the day? Mine was more during the evenings.
The truth is, I felt more ill than pregnant. The baby I was growing inside was like a parasite sucking all the energy and goodness from me. The active and bubbly me vanished in one snap of a finger.
Most days, I wondered how something smaller than a pea could be creating so much havoc! It didn’t even have a significant weight to begin with. But there was enough of it to make me so tired and ill.
Sunshine came back at 14 weeks. Then, there I was back to the gym, back to weekend activity planning and back to dancing and singing, which my supportive husband had missed for weeks. I started to become his happy pill again – his big ridiculous clown.
I read once that pregnancy is a wonderful feeling of excitement. People would come to me and say, “It’s sooo exciting!”. I wish they knew how scared I was inside. I always told myself, until this baby is in my hands, I couldn’t claim it as my own. Sometimes, I wondered if other first-time mothers felt the same. I envied those women who could bravely post on social media and tell the whole world that they were expecting, because I didn’t have that courage. I was and always have been too scared.
My fear, my worries from the first day I knew I was pregnant were justified. Fate has tested us. At my 20-week scan, rushing emotions grew as they informed us that our little one had a heart abnormality.
