I’m 15 weeks Wednesday June 8th… starting my 16th week. Is that crazy or what? I heard the babies’ heartbeats again yesterday and they are goin’ strong. I can even feel them each with my hands/fingers pressing on my belly (my uterus is now up to my belly button). It’s real. I made it. WE made it. I’m PREGNANT WITH TWO BABIES! It’s just more and more real each week that goes by and each time I hear those heartbeats.
My belly is really showing now and that’s fun. I love the way Gina wraps her arm around me or holds my hand when we are taking walks or out of dinner. I love the smiles we get and the way my belly looks when I go to bed at night and look at it from a laying down position. I’m beginning to feel into the part of me that knew I’d love being pregnant. To say I love it is a grande understatement.
All that said… (I’m tired of writing this) I’m still sick. Not nearly as bad but still nausea and still barfing. And just around the time it started lesson, I got this crazy pounding headache that neither my chiropractor, acupuncturists, naturopaths nor Tylenol could put a dent in. For three weeks solid now, it’s been omnipresent. Maddening and at times incapacitating (I just climb in bed and pull over the covers). The victimy part of me is like, “What the F? Can’t I get a fucking break?” I mentioned going to the doc last time and the fluid in my ears, etc. More I’ve learned since then…turns out I have sort of a double whammy: I’ve got a “hormone headache” which can kick in around during weeks 13-20 of pregnancy (it lives the cap of my head and base of my neck) and sinus headache either caused by hormones or allergies or both that lives on the frontal lobe (temples, forehead and the T-Zone of my face). Yeah.
Last week, I tried some new acupuncture that simply exacerbated the issue so badly that I woke up that night at 12:30am– in so much pain it drew me to my (new) rock bottom. I lied in bed in the middle of the night, ice packs on my head, tears streaming down my face. I cried like I haven’t yet cried in this crazy first trimester. I woke Gina and she comforted me for a bit but eventually she needed to sleep and I couldn’t. I left the room and stayed up until 4:30am. I kept crying, journaled and cried some more. It’s hard to explain the grief, isolation, anger and desperation I felt that night. The noise in my head was incessant: “What is going on? Why me? Why this? Am I just a wimp? I should buck up. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I feel any joy? Why can’t I feel the presence of my babies?”
Idgie came to me…so real and so powerful. She just laid with me. Though she comforted me, I cried more, for missing her being with me in my darkest times (in physical form). Eventually, I climbed back into bed and fell asleep.
Five years ago when I first started trying to get pregnant, I dreamt that I would do it so natural it’d be amazing. I’d be the most natural, hippie mama ever! Ha. Now, in reality (the first of many “reality checks”, I’m sure) I’ve made choices that have surprised me: Tylenol, the topical steroid nasal spray (for sinus issues), the Zofran (for puking) and for the headache was prescribed a cup of black tea a day. I NEVER thought I’d do any of those things, particularly caffeine (they assure me the amount I’m taking is safe for babies). In these choices I’ve more deeply learned that really basic “oxygen mask” lesson that seems so simple it’s sort of embarrassing: that is, easing my pain is better for my babies. In all the pain and suffering, I eventually got to a place where the “non-natural”/western meds that promised help would be less risky to my babies than the potential risk/damage that could be done to them by their mama being in so much pain. By taking care of myself via meds that I previously preferred (and vowed) not to take, I ended up relieving my own suffering AND (best of all) feeling better about how my babies were doing. In fact, when I feel into them now as I have less pain… they feel better to me. We all feel better in fact, less tension and contraction, more ease and peace.
Ironically, just yesterday I tried yet another natural supplement (Calcium D-Glucarate by Thorne) that, for women who get this torturous “hormone headache”, swear by. Gina went and picked it up for me so I could try it that very day. Hot-damn-hallelujah, it worked ! Within an hour my hormone headache was gone. I woke up in the morning with it back again but took the supplement and poof, gone again! The sinus headache is something to keep contending with. I don’t want to stay on the steroid nasal spray (makes my nose bleed and makes me clench my teeth) or the caffeine for the duration of my pregnancy so I’m just taking that day by day; trying new things there and also hoping as allergy season eases, I’ll feel better there too.
In the moments when the eye of the storm hits and I have no nausea, no vomiting, no headache, no ear pain at all, I’m happier than I have ever been. Unexplainable, really. And not just because I feel better but because once I’m not so consumed by my physicality, I am totally present to my babies (which I have not been most of this first trimester and that has been a source of sadness for me). I’m also present to my belly, Gina, and my dream being fulfilled… it’s just really awesome. Awesome in the truest sense of the word.
Last week when I hit that rock bottom, the next day I made an appointment to use my birthday money (thanks, Mary!) to go see a Shaman healer for a shamanic + sounding healing session.
It’s more than I will go into here and now but suffice to say a few things:
1. I feel whole again. All the little traumas that have added up over the last few months (and years even) were restored and healed. Bit of my soul lost through the pain and suffering, coming back to me. When I woke up and came out, I cried. I cried because I felt “home” and whole again. Ready and able to deal with whatever comes in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters. I couldn’t have said that before and in fact, it’s why I went.
2. I got a big picture view and newer, more empowering context around the purpose of this suffering. It’s for me but it’s also in service of something greater. It opened my heart and creative juices in a way that feels important, valuable and good. All that I have been observing in my own process as well as others’ is making more sense now.
I can’t help but notice that we don’t live in a culture that supports (or gives room for) the suffering that can happen inside of pregnancy. Yet as I talk to more and more women who also had really difficult first trimesters (many worse than mine, hospitalized, etc.), I am shocked at not only how many there are, but how secret it’s been, and how isolated they felt. In my listening and connecting with them, it’s clear is that their trauma is still there for them … there’s never been a designated place (I have searched high and low for support groups and NOTHING exists) much less a culture to release/process the grief/pain/trauma (unless they go to a therapist, which most don’t because they can’t wrap their minds around a pregnancy being traumatic). Pregnancy is supposed to be great and amazing, right? And so they just keep holding the trauma in their bodies… hoping for the chance to be heard or understood here and there- maybe. I notice it in myself. In the face of no open dialogue about this in our culture, the need to be gotten in this way is intense.
Given the professional work I do is about releasing trauma, hurts and painful history through our bodies, it doesn’t seem an accident I’m learning this particular lesson so directly, does it?
So, while I’m in my own process of it all, I have my eye on the bigger cultural picture and am noticing a need–a desperate need–for some women to have a support group before their babies come. As we know, there is a huge amount of room and support for post-partum related stuff: traumatic labors, kids born with any sort of disorder, multiple babies, etc. But astonishingly, there is nothing for the pregnancy itself.
Who knows what life will look like when these babes are born but I’m playing with the idea of starting a support group for women just to BE together in a designed space to be heard, seen, share and heal about their pregnancies. Maybe even offer somatic stuff with it too. Then again, one thing I’ve learned so far… I know nothing about the future or how any of it will be. So, we’ll see.
3. Lastly, in the Shamanic session, I was given a mantra to repeat 600 times a day. The mantra is: I am a perfect emissary for the Divine. That’s right. Say it out loud and get the power of it. I am the perfect emissary for the Divine. It’s beautiful and meaningful in so many ways… it just awes me.
As always, thanks for listening. You all heal me.
Baby belly pics coming soon.
xo,
regina
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