I am 13 weeks pregnant with my first child. The pregnancy was planned and although my partner and I have not taken the ultimate step and gone and got hitched(doing that abroad next year) we have made any number of life commitments, buying a house together being just one of these.
We love each other very much and the fact that he is Italian and I am Scottish(different religions - at least our families belong to different religions as we are not religious) means that there are some differences between us but they have only served to bring us closer together.
What I just can’t get over is how other people take my being pregnant as a green light to force their often extremely biased opinions on me - and these comments are on matters which are extremely personal, on things which nobody would dare comment on were I not pregnant.
But it’s not just my personal life which is under scrutiny - oh no! - it’s also every little thing I do, or even don’t do, eat or don’t eat, drink or don’t drink. Everyone but everyone not only cannot resist the temptation to get their bit in, but they also speak in the most all-knowing, I-have-the-truth-at-my-fingertips manner. It’s infuriating!
After a very grueling and often pretty miserable first 13 weeks of my pregnancy(I should be happy! I should be enjoying this despite the hormones and shifting sands which are my emotions lately!) I have decided to adopt a new philosophy: to do exactly what I did before I got pregnant. Before I got pregnant I used logic, experience, desire, instinct, my own intelligence and very occasionally the advice I deemed "useful" in order to navigate my way through life. Why then should pregnancy be any different? As far as I can see not much has changed apart from the fact that people become interefering and that I have become emotional and a lot less thick skinned.
While it’s easy to understand why people want to talk about their experiences of an event in their life which is so important, so life changing, in my opinion we all need to remember that advice shouldn’t be offered unless sought. I shall try to remind myself of this in the future!
The same thing goes for Doctors. It’s obvious that they are the enlightened ones when it comes to medicine. However, just because you or your body is not performing in exactly the way "the average pregancies" they base their opinion on, is not necessarily cause for concern.
I am not exactly a Kate Moss lookalike but nor am I fat - I weighed about 67 kilos pre-pregnancy(a little less than 11 stone) and I am 163 cm tall(5 foot 5), but then I am Scottish and not Italian and built for nasty weather and ploughing the fields! However, I put on 5 kilos in my first trimester which absolutely scandalised the rather anorexic, very young and not yet fully qualified doctor(girl). She actually looked heavenwards when the nurse called out my weight and seemed to want to try her best to make me feel like yet another fat Mum to be who can’t-control-her-night time-binges-on-nutella kind of way. Nothing is actually further from the truth. I’m not a saint and I am hungrier, but I have always retained a lot of fluids and I also gave up smoking as soon as I discovered I was pregnant which must have also affected my metabolism.
So, what can we do when faced with a situation like this? The best thing to do is just ignore it. Again, you need to follow your instinct. Mine was silently wishing her a VERY hungry pregnancy when she eventually gets pregnant herself and can finally pratise the rubbish she is preaching and then to try and just put it out of my mind. Nothing is worth getting upset about and nobody, and especially people who haven’t experienced what you are experiencing can truly tell you what only you yourself know.