Lifting Belly

Life is speeding along quickly in our house, which it always does when we are busy... and since we're always busy, life always seems to speed along quickly.  Between working two days a week at my old office job on campus, getting ready for the baby's arrival, taking care of neglected projects around the house, watching tennis, and catching up with friends, the few weeks since I returned from California have slipped by without me feeling like I have anything to report.  So rather than rehashing my daily activities, which seem rather unremarkable, I thought I'd spend some time discussing the question I find myself being asked with increasing frequency:
Do you enjoy being pregnant?

This is my stock short answer for this question: I sure enjoy it now more than I did a few months ago!  I am trying to enjoy this middle stage after the nausea is mostly behind me and before I get so big that I'm uncomfortable.

The long answer is more involved.  I am beginning to suspect that the people who "enjoy" being pregnant most are ones who enjoy being the center of attention, who otherwise feel neglected or in need of more attention in their everyday lives, and/or who enjoy having an excuse to eat excessively.  I am not any of these women.  I do not like having people dote on me or pay me special attention, my husband is good to me all the time (not just because I am pregnant), and pregnancy has actually made it harder, rather than easier, for me to eat. 

There are certainly some things I enjoy about being pregnant.  Most of all, I enjoy that it means there is a baby at the end, and though preparing for her arrival feels like a never-ending checklist of things to accomplish, I like that every passing day brings us closer to her arrival.  I love to see how excited Billy is about the baby and how interested he is in her development.  I also appreciate that he is encouraging and supportive about the changes my body is undergoing, especially since I struggle to recognize myself in the mirror these days.  I like getting a chance to see how excited everyone else is for Baby D's arrival, too, so even though I feel overwhelmed by all the attention I am paid as the "pregnant person" when I arrive somewhere, I try to think of it as attention people are paying to her rather than to me.  I like being told that I am going to be a good mother and/or that Billy is going to be a good father.  I don't know how people come up with these assessments, since how well a person knows us seems to have no correlation to whether they say this or not.  But whenever someone says we will be good parents, it feels like an acknowledgment that we do our best to be good people who do good in the world, and can thus be trusted to teach another little person to do the same, and that's not an acknowledgment you get to hear others make very often.

It is tempting to dwell on the things I miss about not being pregnant.  They're easy to rank right off the top of my head, even though I am well past the miserable nausea that plagued my first trimester.
1) Sleeping through the night, on my stomach
2) Running
3) Sandwiches with deli meat
4) Coffee
5) My regular clothes
6) Alcoholic beverages
I try not to get too hung up on these things, though.  It's worth giving them all up to have a healthy baby come October.  None of them are things I can't have back after our little girl arrives.  Most of them are even things I can work around.  I can eat an occasional tuna sandwich.  I allow myself a frappuccinno once in a while because they only have about half my daily allowance of caffeine.  I like my maternity clothes, too, even though there are some days in which I must try them all on before I can settle on something that looks or feels good enough to wear out of the house.

The best workaround of all, though, has been lifting weights instead of running.  I have gone through periods of weightlifing in my life before, but I can never remember actively enjoying it like I do now.  My new routine consists of 25 minutes of light cardio on the elliptical machine, about 20 minutes of arm lifts, and about 20 minutes of leg lifts.  I try to get to the gym 4 days a week, though when it's nice I sometimes walk the trail instead. 

I have decided that I want to have the baby naturally, without an epidural or other pain medications, and one of the worst things about pregnancy is knowing that this is what I want to do without feeling absolutely sure that I will be able to do it.  So I think the main reason I enjoy lifting these days is because I have convinced myself that it is good preparation for childbirth.    When I lift weights, I do three sets of every exercise with a short break between sets.  Each set gets increasingly difficult, and sometimes the last few lifts are quite painful... but then you get to take a break to recover and mentally prepare for the next set.  I like to think labor will be a lot like this, since the heightened pain of the contractions is broken up by less painful intervals in which you can try to let your body relax.  Women I know who have succeeded at delivering naturally tell me the key is to tell yourself, each time, that you can make it through one more contraction.  I think that's a lot like weight training, where it's always easier to get through the exercise if you focus on finishing one set at a time.  The main difference, obviously, is that you can choose to slow down as the reps get harder, and you get to decide how much time to take off between sets, and neither of those is the case in labor.  This type of exercise is certainly more similar to labor than distance running, though, for which I have had to teach myself to endure a long period of increasingly difficult but never unmanageable discomfort.  To be perfectly honest, the reason I am still an exceptionally slow distance runner is because I have never succeeded at forcing myself to enjoy or even endure interval training. 

Whether lifting is really good mental and physical preparation for labor, however, is not really the point.  The important thing is that I have convinced myself it is.  I've written before about how my distance running helps me in my academics because it gives me the chance to exercise my determination.  I equate these things with one another because both require persistence and keeping the end goal in sight while focusing on achieving the markers of progress along the way.  Both give me that same deep feeling of satisfaction that I can only get from accomplishing something that's really difficult.  So each time I lift, I continue to build up the parallels between lifting and labor in my head, because I know it will help me mentally even if stronger legs and arms don't actually make labor any easier.  The parallels continue, really.  When I get done running, I'm tired, but my body rarely physically hurts the way it does when I finish lifting.  Sometimes my body hurts for days afterwards, which I certainly expect to be the case after giving birth.  But it's that good hurt-- that "I just accomplished something difficult and good for me" hurt-- which gives me the satisfaction necessary to convince me to get back to the gym.  Plus, there is one thing I know for sure: now that I've graduated from 5 lb curls to 7.5 lb curls to 10 lb curls, I'm much more prepared for lugging around a baby and all of her stuff!

So perhaps a better answer to the question, "Do you enjoy being pregnant?" would be: I enjoy my regular life so much that I do not automatically find pregnancy to be additionally enjoyable.  But I am so excited about having the baby that I am working on learning how to enjoy pregnancy, to appreciate the changes it has brought into my life, to recognize what new things it can teach me about myself and those I love, and to be thankful for the ways it is preparing me to be a mother and to handle the changes that are ahead of me.

P.S. My belly is quickly obscuring my view of my Asics.  And I've only made it through 30 of the 688 pages of Digital SLR Photography All-In-One for Dummies, so I don't know if it would have been possible to get my belly and my feet in focus in the same shot.  Hopefully I can figure this camera out before I have to share blurry baby photos, too.

("Lifting Belly" is an erotic lesbian poem by Gertrude Stein.  As such, its content has very little in common with a blog a post about a heteronormative pregnant woman lifting weights during her pregnancy.  But I have to be careful, when I lift, to avoid doing anything that could strain my belly or my changing abdominal muscles, so the title of this poem frequently pops into my head and makes me smile at the irony when I'm lifting.  And then the brain starts going, and it thinks things like "Maybe it's not so different.  The poem and what I'm doing are both about one female demonstrating her love for another in a very bodily way.  I have to lift, rather than run, because my daughter is literally physically attached to me and dependent on me in ways Stein describes being joined with her lover.  So the only real difference is the erotics..." and further down the rabbit hole.  But these are thoughts only a handful of academically-minded people who've read Stein's poem might care about, and I haven't really begun to sort them out... so I'll save that line of thought for a conference presentation someday or something.)