The Nausea, the Fatigue

Finally, this morning, for the first time in six weeks, I woke up without feeling desperately tired or feeling ill. It felt so good--I'd almost forgotten what it was like to feel normal.

I've been looking at a lot of pregnancy and baby sites, looking for guidance, advice, and stories. Instead, I've found a cheeriness that seems . . . well, to put it bluntly, creepy.

People go on and on about how wonderful it is to be pregnant, and to bear a child, skimming quickly over the uncomfortable bits and pointing out that it's all worth it.

Is it? Personally, I feel invaded. Hubby has started calling it "the parasite," in an affectionate way, of course. I feel tired all the time, nauseated frequently. I can't drink wine, which I love, anymore.

I'm not saying it's not worth it to have children. I still want children. But is it really worth it to bear them yourself? Nine months of intense discomfort and the theft of your bodily functions, to go through a ridiculous amount of pain to push out something that you could love just as easily if it were grown from a glass tube.

Men don't carry babies, but they love them, too. Why should it be a requirement that women go through nine months of purgatory--if not hell--just to feel like they have the right to love them? People love babies they adopt.

Evolution has cheated women. Humans are the only species that not only takes this long to produce offspring, but produces babies that aren't fully developed when they're born (foals walk shortly after being born, for example). All that work and they're not even done? Something somewhere along the way has gone seriously wrong. I vote for a misogynist conspiracy.