The weird pregnancy stuff no one tells you

As a chronically obsessive Googler and amateur researcher, I jumped online literally seconds after the pregnancy test stick showed that first faint, pink line.

And after reading every single article I could find, joining the What To Expect When You’re Expecting online forum, joining Mumsnet, joining ten thousand Facebook groups and re-reading my copy of Kaz Cooke’s Up the Duff approximately 146 times, I really thought I knew pretty much everything there was to know about pregnancy.

As it turned out, though, I really didn’t know the half of it. Pregnancy, like parenthood itself, is one of those things you can never really prepare yourself for.

Here, in no particular order, are the seven bizarre body changes that NO ONE told me were a thing before I was pregnant.

1. The drooling

Dear god, the drooling. Apart from the classic ‘feeling like you have severe carsickness for three months’, sometime after about 5pm each day throughout the whole of the first trimester, my saliva production was thrown into hyperdrive. The problem was so bad, I spent every evening lying on the sofa just softly groaning, head hanging off the side, with a hand towel held up to my open mouth to catch the flow – because I felt so nauseated, the idea of having so much spit in my mouth made me feel even sicker. This went on for weeks. Aussie actor Yvonne Strahovski recently revealed she’d suffered from this as well, a confession which came two years too late for me. Better late than never.

2. The weight gain

Yes, obviously I was aware that there would be weight gain involved in carrying an entire human being around in my own body, but I naively thought this wouldn’t happen until quite a ways into the piece. I got pregnant three months before our wedding, and when I first realised, I actually thought to myself, Well, at least I’ll lose a bit of weight from vomiting in the first trimester and the dress will look amazing. I do NOT condone this way of thinking, but I was struggling to fit into my gown as it was, and I was getting a bit desperate to find the silver lining in not being able to drink at the reception. Anyway yeah, nah. I didn’t throw up once. Instead, I just felt constantly carsick, and the only things that made it go away were ramen noodles, mashed potato and macaroni cheese. I put on 10kg in two months and had to buy a whole new wedding dress off Gumtree at the last minute. Incidentally, if anyone out there would like to purchase a beautiful, never-worn full corded-lace wedding gown for a knock-down price, hit me up.

3. The cucumbers

Gee whiz, that first trimester really is a doozy. I know I just said my pregnancy diet consisted of fat and carbs, but in between meals the only thing keeping me together was… Lebanese cucumbers. I’d bring them in to work by the half dozen and sit there at my desk all day just chowing down on whole cucumbers. Half the office had already figured out I was knocked up purely because of my bizarre new eating habits.

4. Loose ligaments

Did you know that when you’re pregnant, your body prepares for everything to be stretched out and opened up, by releasing a hormone called ‘relaxin’? It sounds like a fun time but it’s not, because it makes all your joints super flexible. Actually, that still sounds like a fun time, so let me put it another way: my hips suddenly felt like they were about to separate from the rest of my body, and my legs were being taken with them. My fingers and thumbs suddenly developed the weird ability to bend backwards. It was painful and not fun at all, and by the end of the pregnancy I could barely walk. Speaking of walking, my feet suddenly spread out like pancake batter on a frypan and I couldn’t wear anything but Birkenstocks. I wore them to work, to brunch, and even to a wedding. Jus’ relaxin.

5. Carpal tunnel

Yay for carpal tunnel, not. This is where there is so much pressure on your ‘median nerve’, aka a nerve that runs from your wrist to your elbow, that you get pain, tingling and numbness all down your arm and hands. In my case it was caused by the insane amounts of fluid I was carrying around with me. As in, I was puffed up like a water balloon. So much water weight, so much agony in my poor, swollen fingers. Jewellery was out of the question as well because none of it fit any more.

6. The constipation

Sorry to all our squeamish readers but you know this would get gross eventually, right? I often felt like maybe this was nature’s way of preparing mothers-to-be for the trials of a natural delivery. That’s probably all I have to say about that.

7. Hair gain.

Ok, this was something I knew might happen but it was so awesome. None of your hair falls out when you’re pregnant – it just grows and grows and grows. By the time our daughter was born I had the lushest, thickest hair of my life and I bloody loved it. The flip side to this was that I also had an outcrop of weirdly long hairs just below my tummy button, which were a sweet complement to the new stretch marks. Swings and roundabouts.

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