I feel like a fraud. Like I’m just pretending to be part of this club with which
I now know so much, the “Being Pregnant Club”. I feel like a dab hand at it, I know what to expect, the ins
and outs, the ups and downs, and now the ‘what can go wrong’. But while I sit here in this groundhog
day of being perpetually pregnant, others graduate before me. I feel like the dunce at the back of the
classroom – unable to move beyond this grade and onto the next.
I don’t feel like I belong. I’m nervous to start
wearing maternity clothes. I can’t
tell if it’s because I don’t feel I deserve to with a second pregnancy and yet
no baby, or because it means accepting that this pregnancy is slowly burgeoning,
become more and more real.
I don’t want to step inside a baby store and buy the
things that I was initially looking forward to, a new cot and stroller rather
than the second hand ones we had ready for Amelia. The idea of being amongst those happy, pregnant people –
again I feel like I don’t belong, I am not one of them, I am not blissfully
happy and excited, I am not of the belief I will get a baby to take home. There are still so many months to go,
still too many things that could go wrong.
I am annoyed when people tell me of friends and family
that are pregnant for the first time and expect me to feel some kinship or
excitement that they are pregnant while I am. That so-and-so had their first antenatal class last week and
are most nervous because 10 people are due before them and they don’t want to
hear all those birth stories before they get there. I could tell them one they surely don’t want to hear!
It’s a strange feeling, because while I feel like a
fraud, I still am hopeful. I am
not constantly anxious like I thought I would be. I worry and question and feel guilty I’m not doing enough for
the baby – but this, I can imagine, is what any mother feels – a feeling that
will hopefully last well into when this baby is an adult and having children of
their own.
You see, I still have hope I will bring this baby home
– I still look forward to that day that I will hold this baby in my arms and
hope to hear their cry herald through the air announcing their arrival, awake
and alive into this world.
