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He Says, She Says
How to survive pregnancy
Award-winning wife and husband writers Robyn Wilder and Stuart Heritage get real on the seven things that may surprise you about pregnancy
1. First things first – there’s no such thing as ‘a little bit pregnant’.
Some people underestimate the first trimester of a pregnancy. It’s as though they consider it an administrative technicality, rather than true pregnancy, and can get sniffy about maternity clothes and ‘baby on board’ badges appearing on someone before they’re even showing. But there’s no law against it – and in your first trimester you are as legitimately pregnant as you are in your last.
2. I have two sons, and as a 5ft pregnant woman carrying DNA from a 6ft man, at full-term I looked like one of those cuboid watermelons. I was enormous and in constant peril of tipping over.
I have honestly never felt more in need of a seat – or an elasticated waistband – as I did during my first trimesters. I was nauseous, dizzy, bloated and constantly falling asleep. With good reason – although a human develops in your uterus over nine months, you spend the first 12 weeks speed-growing a brand new internal organ: your placenta. And this is what feeds the baby from the second trimester onwards. The fact that it’s finished building itself is largely why much of your fatigue and morning sickness goes away.
So break out your badge and step into your maternity jeggings as soon as you like. If someone gives you lip about it, tell them about your placenta. Or, depending on your aim, throw up on them.
Robyn and Stuart share some home truths about pregnancy
3. The year I was pregnant with my first son I also got engaged, married, went on honeymoon (where I sprained my ankle), went on a babymoon (where I cracked a rib), then finally I left the city I’d called home for 20 years to move to a town where I knew no one. One month later, I gave birth. I don’t recommend it. I also requested John Lewis vouchers instead of wedding gifts, which was wise – then spent them all on stuff for the baby, which was less wise.
When it comes to your third trimester, try to spend as much of it resting with your cankles propped up. It’s the perfect opportunity to go online and buy some pillow slides – anything south of the belly button will be inaccessible for a few more weeks. If you find your legs get overheated at night and kick about helplessly in bed, try a magnesium supplement.
4. You can also stock up on the bare minimum of baby stuff, and make a note of your local baby groups and sling libraries. That way you can test-drive buggies and baby carriers with your actual child.
I don’t have many regrets when it comes to pregnancy, but if I’d followed this advice, perhaps I wouldn’t have panic-selected a buggy based on its colour (khaki) that I would later find impossible to collapse without pulling up a YouTube tutorial to show you how. Because that really annoyed everyone behind me in the bus queue, every one of the five times I did it.
5. The good news here is that, as a man, you are almost completely guaranteed to survive pregnancy. This is because absolutely none of it is about you. You are, at best, going to spend the next two thirds of a year as an invested bystander.
Sure, there’ll be the first wave of excitement. The day you find out that you’re going to be a father, everything changes. You see the world as it really is, as a place of beauty and potential, while also panicking about everything from your earning ability to how easily the corners of your coffee table could take a baby’s eye out. It’s a rush of adrenaline that comes in full bore out of nowhere.
But then it passes. And there’s eight and a half months to go. In those eight and a half months, your partner’s body will change. Her internal organs will become squished beyond all recognition. Her hair will variously fall out or grow in such violent quantities that you’ll want to call in a fumigator. Her mood, quite reasonably, will fluctuate without warning several times a day. Food she previously enjoyed will make her vomit. Including food that she specifically requested you to cook for her this afternoon.
6. None of this will happen to you, of course. And so you will automatically become the support person. If that means rubbing her feet when you finish work, so be it. If that means going to buy her a McDonald’s whenever she wants one, so be it. If it means bending down and literally putting her shoes on for her whenever she wants to go out, then that’s what you have to do.
And it isn’t fun, suddenly subsuming all your own needs in service of somebody else, often without thanks. But guess what? This is just the start. Wait until your child is born, and learns to talk, and then proceeds to literally spend 23 hours a day asking you for stuff.
7. Wait until you have to spend your life cooking food for a toddler who angrily rejects every single scrap of food you ever put in front of them. Oh, how you’ll wish that your responsibilities just ended with a foot rub every couple of nights.
You may not realise it now, but this is the least you’ll have to do for the next 20 years of your life. Relish it.
