When eating for two feels like being all alone

Before being pregnant, I had many friends with children. It probably happens because I love kids. I was a special education teacher for 5 years and the part that was the best about it was kids. I like all ages of kids too: toddlers, tweens, teens.

So since I have so many friends with kids, I didn't realize how isolating pregnancy can be. Until I was pregnant. And suddenly, I wasn't invited anymore. It wasn't a malicious thing on anyone's part. Its just that a lot of my friends are drinkers, and athletes. And a lot of what we do together is sports and drinking. Most times when we go out, I drink, but sometimes not. Sometimes I'm the DD or I just don't feel like it or I have one beer and call it good.

While I stayed active during pregnancy, you just can't go ski off a rock, or drink until 1 am. And so suddenly, I found myself alone a lot. Now, I like being alone. So it actually took me quite a while to notice that I hadn't been seeing people a whole lot. I'm lucky that way. And I didn't generally take it too personally. But I was pregnant and there's hormones and and and I'm not going to pretend I didn't ever feel left out.

But as I said, I like being alone. And I was busy overeating and sleeping a whole lot and enjoying doing a lot of reading so it wasn't too bad. But I'm pretty sure lots of women feel very lonely while pregnant. And you're supposed to be so happy and flowery that its hard to mention it to anyone. Especially when all people want to talk to you about is pregnancy. Then next thing you know it, all you can talk about is pregnancy and the baby babybabybaby. And you just don't feel like you; you feel like giant, all-alone you.

My husband has been eating inordinate amounts of gas producing foods lately. This became obvious the night I could no longer put clothing away in my son's room because of the stink cloud that had taken over his room. My son, was unfazed and smiling adoringly at his father. So I left them to it. FYI, when you fart really loud in the kid's room and someone is in the next room, it makes the "voice" activated monitor turn on and you can hear the fart in stereo. My husband got to fist pumping over this.

I'd react or ask him to put a handle on it, but in my first trimester I was the gassiest thing alive. So there's a little shit no one tells you. Everyone tells you about the vomiting in the first trimester and most ladies hear about how tired you are, but no one mentions the insane amount of gas. If you're embarrassed about it, you should get over it by farting next to the monitor, because it really is funny.

Everyone tells you that your body releases relaxin during pregnancy in order to relax your joints so that your hips can widen for the baby to come out. Relaxin ends up in weird joints though which on me ended up popping all the time. The weirdest two places that popped: my pubus, and my sternum. Didn't hurt, just creeped me out.

Before being pregnant myself, I thought of pregnant women as beautiful. As these benevolent looking beauties, swelling with mothering floweriness. Seriously.

But sexy and beautiful are not the same thing. You can be pretty without striking thoughts of wild romps in the hay into anyone's eyes. So felt I about pregnancy.

Plus, everyone envisions pregnancy as being about the 5-6 month mark. But you don't just one day look like you swallowed a basketball. There's an awkward stage or two to get there, where you don't look pregnant, you just look fat... or something.

And during that stage of awkwardness, I was shocked the first time I felt it. My stomach touched my husband's stomach during sex.

I thought I would not have to worry about weird feelings about sex until the time when it just doesn't work well to have sex in any position but spooning (also a myth.) Either that, or the thought had occurred to me that the baby might move during sex and completely take the wind out of my sails (that luckily never happened.)

There are, of course, body images to contend with when you're pregnant. Its a weird thing to have your body take on a brand new shape. Especially when you've gotten used to the shape its in for the past 10 or 15 years and most women, let's face it, aren't completely comfortable with that shape. And I had thought of all this. Heard about this. Read about this.

But the stomachs touching. Yuck.

Here's some thoughts I have on how to continue to enjoy sex if you feel like its not going so well. There's the obvious stuff: talk to your partner and share your feelings about your body. Buy clothes/makeup/shoes/purses something that makes you feel feminine and good about you. Thrift is no excuse, thrift stores exist to solve that one. Those are the obvious things.

Shit no one tells you, you might feel better if you've seen a preggo porno.

There I said it.

Not sure about you, but I have sexy images in my head that play at times during sex. I couldn't figure out how to sit in my preggo body and participate in any mental images of what was sexy. I needed an outside image to help me along. So I watched some pornos. If it works, don't question it. It gave me a mental construct of a sexy pregnant woman.

I'm not saying my husband and I took off on porno grade sexual escapades after this. But I was able to orgasm again. I have no science to back this, but it seems intuitively true to me that you should have lots of orgasms during pregnancy. Orgasms cause your uterus to contract and it seems likely that it helps keep your uterus healthy and strong during pregnancy so that in labor it will be able to contract easily the way it should. Again, I have no science behind this, but I'd call for an orgasm a day during pregnancy and say it sure can't hurt.