A friend asked me to journal while I’m pregnant. I realized I really haven’t journaled much in recent months, or even years. I started this blog four years ago, but have mostly left it there. I want to resume my journaling practice, and I think daily blog posting could be a good goal to aim at.
I found I was pregnant on Dec 21, 2023. It was an expected surprise. We wanted a child and had been trying (though without putting much effort) since the summer. The first couple months saw no positive results, and then I was carried away by heavy work near the end of the year. Seeing a urologist in late November reminded me that my period hadn’t come for a while, but I forgot to do a test afterwards. In mid December, I was having constipation for days. I automatically attributed it to extended sitting and lack of exercise. I even took a pill that would facilitate digestion.
It was not until the night of Dec 20 that I thought again my period hadn’t come for ages. I tested the next morning, but quickly dismissed the lines as “not pregnant.” When I was showering later, my husband came in and asked, in a rather careful tone, “When did you look at the test result?” He said he just looked and it was two lines, which meant positive. “No way!” I said. I had even compared my result with the chart on the instruction. But I knew he was right—I had been so careless about this pregnancy thing that even when I saw a positive result I ignored it.
“We have a baby!!” “You’ll be a dad!!” We hugged when I came out of the shower. It was coming true.
The first five months of pregnancy has passed surprisingly fast. We told my parents and grandparents soon after we confirmed the result with another test and shared the news with his family on Christmas day. Everybody was happy. My paternal grandma responded with a long “Auhhhh” on the other end of the phone, meaning both “Got it” and “Oh my god!” My maternal grandma, knowing we’d be home when I was three months pregnant, soon started requesting home-raised chickens and ducks from her rural relatives. My mom exclaimed with her arms open and said, “I’ll be a grandma now!” And my mother-in-law gave me a hug, and I hugged her back. It was one of the few genuinely excited hugs one can have with her mother-in-law.
But soon after the initial excitement passed, worries came up. The first was about my body shape. I easily obsess over things, and things that will be lost always trigger my fear. I can’t say I have a good body shape, but the flat belly was one thing I could take pride in. I looked good in Qipao, the Chinese dress that flatters a woman’s curve. But now my belly would turn into a saggy bag. I recalled the loose skin and wrinkles on my mother’s belly when I showered with her in my early years. On the internet, new mothers’ bellies hung loose like an overused fanny pack. I was terrified.
For a few days, I busied myself finding a boudoir photographer—I needed to record how I was before the changes happened! But that was already nine or ten weeks into my pregnancy. I learned the word bloating, which happens when gas accumulates in a pregnant tummy, and I constantly worried that I was already bloating. The curve on the sides started to disappear. I wasn’t sure if it was reality or my illusion.
My husband and my therapist persuaded me not to do a photo shoot. It was my therapist’s feminist stance that women shouldn’t be so worried about their body shape that convinced me to let go of the idea. Deep in my heart, I knew embracing the change was what I needed to do. Still, to this day, I lament the loss of my youth. I lament how I looked by myself and with my husband when I looked perfect—I know, I never was. It’s just the imperfect, or change, was coming too fast.
Seeing our baby through the ultrasound was delightful. Even as early as ten weeks and five days, he was moving his limbs actively as if swimming in the womb. Busy guy! And an NIPT test on the same day allowed me to know the sex of the baby soon after—it was a boy! My dream of having a girl I could have an emotional bond with was gone. Still, all this information just made it all seem more real.
Our busy travel schedule in the next couple months took my attention away from my belly. Traveling in Japan and walking all day for over a week was a bit worrisome, plus the raw fish I couldn’t eat. Luckily, nothing bad happened, and in early February we landed in my grandparents’ city in China. Nothing soothed and satisfied me more than the home-made chicken soup on the first day. Then it was a month of endless good food. I almost couldn’t tell if it was the baby or the food that was filling up my tummy.
Late February, my family and my husband said it was actually growing. Actually! Now, a few days after we came back to the US, I started to feel the baby move. At first I felt a subtle fluttering, which could very well be the moving of my stomach. But soon, I felt his little limb pushing my belly out. One here and another there, very much like the whack-a-mole game I played in parks as a kid—they just kept popping up! The first night it was only once, but then it came up during the day as well, multiple times whenever I paid attention to it. My husband also started to feel it when he put his hand on my belly.
Feeling his movement made it all seem even more real. Now, as my belly skin is stretching more, I take putting on cream more seriously. It’s become a ritual for my husband to rub oil onto my belly before bedtime. When he puts his hand there, before we go to sleep or when we watch a movie, it’s quite lovely.
As the arrival of the tiny person gets closer and closer, I face new decisions. What about postpartum recovery? In China, new mothers spend a month (called zuo yuezi) resting, eating carefully prepared food, and following certain rules that are supposed to help the body recover and prevent future complications. But here, a few lessons in the hospital seem like the most you’ll get. My husband, and part of me too, think of going to yuezi center a middle-class fad. It surely doesn’t need to be so exorbitantly expensive, but what amount of care is appropriate? What should I do to restore my body and hopefully return my belly to how it was (if possible at all)?
I realize throughout this pregnancy, my questions are a mix of my obsessive worries and legitimate concerns. That is part of being a new mom, or part of being a person living in the world. My reason and emotion pull me in different directions. It all becomes more complicated in face of the quick changes that happen during these nine months.
Living in a cross-cultural family adds to the fun and complication. Recently, I started reading books about multilingual education. I can’t allow my child to grow up not knowing my language and my culture. Every book I’ve read seems to say that consistent input in a language is important. But with my husband we have been communicating primarily in English, and switching to Chinese, though he has been advocating for it for years, still feels weird to me. Then how do we make this work—would it feel weird that I talked to the child in Chinese and to my husband in English? How would the child take it? On top of that, how to teach him to read and write in Chinese and make sure he’s culturally immersed?
There’s so much to think about. And I’m sure if my child sees this in the future, he will think what a worried mom I already am. One thing my husband told me early in my pregnancy was that we had to be okay with making mistakes on our child. Six weeks and a half had passed before I found out I was pregnant, and I regretted not taking prenatal vitamins for all those months my doctor had told me to. But it very likely would be okay. We would make so many more mistakes, and our child and we as parents would be far from perfect, and that was okay, he said.
I think that might be the hardest lesson for me to learn.