Manifesto by the Alliance of Mothers Supporting Truthful Pregnancy Stories
Concerning women about to get pregnant
Hi there! You are planning to embark on an adventure that is probably one of the greatest ones you’ll ever experience. Congratulations! The next nine months will prepare you for that adventure. In 2010, the Alliance of Mothers Supporting Truthful Pregnancy Stories was founded, which mission is to truthfully inform women on what to expect while the Miracle of Life unfolds.
If you’re not one of those women who appreciate bluntness, stop reading this manifesto!
First the most important news, which also happens to be very good: having a baby is an amazing experience. There’s nothing like it. You’ll find that you’re able to love someone you never even met; you can talk to sheer movement, and you will worry about someone else’s well-being more than you ever worried about your own. You will be a key witness to a person coming into existence, into your existence, in every sense of the word.
While this probably is one of the best things to ever happen to you, a lot of side effects will keep you pretty busy. Contrary to custom until now, we feel you have a right to know about them. Attached is a – non-comprehensive - list of things to expect:
· You will feel sick for a period ranging from about a week to a maximum of 42 weeks. You may be forced to eat dry cereal, sit on the floor of a supermarket, and eat when your body tells you not to.
· You will feel sleepier than you ever felt before. Enjoy sleeping for the first 13 weeks; after that, you might not sleep an entire night for a long, long time.
· Your boobs will double in size. Some of you will like it; some of you won’t. It’s a double-edged sword anyway.
· Many people will tell you to watch out for stress. Their constant reminders of this are huge stress factors. What ís stress, anyway?
· You will start crying at the oddest moments for the oddest reasons. Within nano seconds after your breakdown, however, you will be able to be elated, furious or totally numb.
· Expect a bloody nose every now and then.
· You will not be able to eat the things you used to love, and crave stuff you used to hate. You will be forced to go into the supermarket to let your instincts lead you to the right foods for you at that precise moments. You will buy stuff you won’t be able to eat anymore the day after. You will get food obsessions. You will force friends to prepare you dinner.
· You will forget the simplest things. You will not be able to conduct a decent discussions, because you won’t remember your perspective.
· You will gain weight. You will not be able to fit into your own clothes and you will be forced to get a new wardrobe of maternity clothes. You will learn that the maternity industry caters only for a select group of women, thereby accomplishing what you spent your whole life to avoid: blending in with a very specific, very girly, flowery, pink-colored group.
· You will be faced with something they absurdly call ‘minor ailments’, such as restless legs, stomach acid, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, and Braxton-Hicks contractions.
· In the middle of your pregnancy, people will smile at you when they see you walking on the street. Enjoy these moments. By the end of your pregnancy, they will be shocked instead.
· Your world will become smaller and smaller; the things you used to find important will start to matter less and less. This might seem frightening to you right now, but it’s actually quite a nice sensation.
· You will feel overwhelmed, not up for it at times, exhausted, panicked, and daunted.
· After all of it is over, a very smart and helpful hormone will make you forget about all of the above and make you not tell anyone else.
Ok, this is getting to me more of an album than a weblog, but bare with me for a while, please. First of all, I do think these days that nothing is as good as watching him, so all my words get in the way of another picture of him. Second, I don't have that much time to type away... But I do have a lot to tell. About how he was born, and my first days with him, and the world we are exploring together, and the way I am very happy to have my body back, and..... well, there's a lot to tell.
All of that later. For now: Liam was born on Tuesday, July 27th at 22.03 pm. He weighed 4230 gram at that day, but by now (3 wks old) he has gained a lot and is at 4900. So he's quite a big boy. To me, he appears to be a rather serious boy, looking out into the world like he's thinking a lot. But that also might be caused by his first problem in life: he has a lot of stomach cramps. And by 'a lot', I mean A LOT! He has got some medicine for it, which helps a bit. I hope that he will have outgrown most of it by six wks (that's what they tell me will probably happen), but right now that seems hard to believe.
When he's not troubled by the cramps, he likes looking out into the world a lot. But whenever that happens, I'm so busy entertaining him, that I forget to make pictures, which is why he is mostly shot sleeping...
As for me, I'm doing fine. The first week was kind of tough, with a lot of information to process, trying to get back on my feet and thus gaining back a little bit of my independence, hormones raging throught my body and head, and a very, very overwhelming load of - at the risk of sounding sentimental, but hey, I AM sentimental these days - love for Liam. I never knew I had it in me, but now it's definitely there...What a boy, what great happiness. Lucky me. 
