Open Letter To My Body On The Day I Found Out I Was Pregnant
byM. Esther Sherman
Dear Body of Mine,
Congratulations! And, I’m sorry. I have good news and bad news. The good news is we're going to be having a baby. The bad news is you’re going to be growing it inside of you and the process is going to be painful. You’re going to be changing, growing, and stretching. There are going to be things you won’t understand, pains you’ve never experienced, and your hormones will be going nuts throughout the duration of all of this. For the next nine months (ha, just kidding — probably more than 9 months), you’re going to go through something that is both beautiful and agonizing. It will be the best thing you’ll ever do (maybe) and also the scariest (probably); You might love it... but you might not. I can promise you that I will be grateful to you for the rest of our life for doing this hard thing.
Many of the changes about to take place, some of the icky stuff, will go away in nine months. Some of the changes will be permanent. Some of the changes will fall somewhere in between nine months and permanent. I know that right now, if you’re reading this in the early morning, there’s a thick layer of vomit rising in your throat. That’s perfectly normal and it will be happening a lot. Don’t worry, that’s one of the things that will go away – for some people, it even goes away in less than nine months. I apologize again but that won’t be the case for you; we're going to be pregnant longer than that, and those last few weeks are going to be brutal. As you head into this unsettling time, there are some things I’d like you to know: