Читать книгу Blooming Birth: How to get the pregnancy and birth you want - Lucy Atkins - Страница 7

Pregnancy can make you feel unbelievably beautiful; replete with hope and womanliness. It can be a blissful time, not least because those of us who’ve spent the last ten years trying to disguise our flabby bellies get to show them off in tight tops. Pregnancy can be a time when you’re treated like a goddess by your partner; a time when blokes in white vans look on protectively as you cross the road; when people give you seats on the bus (well, occasionally) and when strangers congratulate you. You may, as the months go by, look more and more fantastic, and feel amazing: have thicker hair, better skin, stronger nails and a beatific glow. It’s a time, in short, when you feel that life is the oyster inside the pearly shell that’s you.

But this may not be the whole story. For most of us, pregnancy doesn’t feel like glorious fruition all the time. At times it can feel distinctly disempowering to be up the duff. You can’t control what’s happening to your body and you may feel as if you’ve been hijacked by medical professionals and, indeed, a small alien. You may be constantly vomiting. You may have mood swings. You may feel shattered. You may also swell to the size of a house, sprout varicose veins and become a borderline psychotic. Pregnancy involves huge contradictions – physical and mental. Pregnancy books often use words like ‘blessing’, ‘joy’ and ‘gift’. A pregnancy may be all of these things but at times you can feel more like an overstuffed mammoth than a fecund goddess; more axe murderer than earth mother. Much of this is hormonal. Much entirely reasonable, all of it normal.