But considering that my last three shifts involved two RRTs and a fifteen hour night, I'm not cracking open the (pointless non-alcoholic) champagne just yet.
I don't know how I'd feel about nursing if I was less tired. I do know that right now I only feel broken. Completely broken. Dangerously, hormonally, on-the-edge-of-mood-disordered broken. I would advise individuals with a family history of severe, unrelenting depression, bipolar disorder, addiction, and bulimia to avoid night shift when possible. Particularly when a chunk of that history was written by said individuals and the professionals paid to manage them.
If you're interested, my fetus supposedly is five inches long now. I can feel her move. I alternate between being distressed about the havoc this has wrought -- wreaked? -- on my previously somewhat-flat abdomen and feeling like the possibility of the kid effing off at this point is manageable because I haven't yet crossed a hundred twenty pounds.
Because, discouragingly, it still seems to bear pointing out: what I described right there is pathological. That set of feelings about one's pregnant body is not "real talk" so much as it is progress notes for a professional helper of some kind. Please do not take from this that the expectation of maintaining a flat abdomen or one's ninth-grade weight into one's second trimester is appropriate.
When I read "news" features and links about baby bumps and baby weight, I feel like an alien, because no matter how thin I were to become, I wouldn't ever consider my body "bikini ready". Not because I dislike how it looks but because I value the person living in it too much to evaluate her based on what some stranger thinks her body parts look like.
But I do feel like if I can just keep my body un-soft, I can keep myself from being broken by loss if the pregnancy doesn't work out. It's there, a worry as I drag my exhausted self to work and back, how my default is to confuse lack of affect with invulnerability and invulnerability with strength, and to beeline for the lowest common denominator at all times. It reminds me of girlfriends and boyfriends who I identified as such only after the fact, when I realized that you can become pretty cruel without expressing a single emotion.
I feel like this is a more interesting experience of the pregnant body, as grim as it sounds and feels, than the distress calls about boobs that fail to regain their elasticity -- which, I don't know. I don't feel capable of strong feelings about my breasts, prepartum or post. I.... don't really spend much time looking at my boobs, because I have yet to learn Russian or finish Game of Thrones or pay off my student loan debt, and because life is finite.
I don't know if my kind of fears are also what other moms and women are actually talking about when they fret about their bodies, or if there exist women for whom the expectation that they bodies look a specific way segueways into straight-up shame and doubt and not cynicism and dark humor. I'm not afraid of my body not being sexy, first, because if you feel entitled to have an opinion on my physical appearance and you are not financing its maintenance, you and I have radically different views on women and what they owe you; second, because my ability to live comfortably in it is predicated on my belief that my body isn't sexy, and isn't required to be or supposed to be. But I am very afraid of my body being out of my control. Of the fact that my body is out of my control. And of the reality that at some point I may come to count on it to do things -- make it through another night shift; carry this child; keep it alive -- and it won't.
My body's not a good body. It's just bad for a set of reasons entirely distinct from those Facebook persistently opines that I "might like" to read about.
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