Mother Is Here
Hola amiguis! LOL at me doing a whole relaunch of my blog and then *BOOM* pregnant! I did not intend to do an entire rebrand/relaunch and then go dark. I was very excited to keep the momentum of La Pan Dulce going! Not even a week after releasing my last blog post, I found out I was pregnant with my first baby!
Me with my fresh positive pregnancy test on 1/24/23
Although I had been thinking that I wanted to start contemplating the idea of having children this year, I definitely did not expect it to happen so soon.
In January this past year, I was supposed to start my cycle and was only 2 days late but was having PMS symptoms instead which isn’t normal for me. I thought I was being paranoid, but there was one tiny instance that happened a few weeks earlier where I was out at dinner with friends and out of nowhere felt like I was going to be sick. I was drinking several cocktails so I thought I was just drunk. Thinking back to that little moment with a late cycle made me think hmm let me just make sure and take a pregnancy test.
3 positive pregnancy tests later, I finally came out of the bathroom and shakily told my husband “I’m pregnant,” and immediately burst into tears and hugged him. It was so hard to believe, I took the last test just in case (lol!) and before I could pull my pants up the test said, “bitch, you’re pregnant!” The thing that I was always afraid of happening became real and it felt good to be allowed to feel happy about it instead of scared.
I have always been afraid of becoming pregnant before I was ready. Being raised by a teen mom, seeing how hard it was for her was enough to convince me to not have kids until it felt right for me. Not to say that I feel super prepared for my world to be turned upside down, but I think I finally was at a point where it was more like “this could be a good time.”
Anecdotally, the first trimester is the hardest. That’s when morning sickness happens, your boobs hurt, you can’t eat anything, you’re exhausted, constipated, bloated, etc, but luckily for me I did not have any severe symptoms. Other than that one time feeling sick at the restaurant, I mainly was energetically exhausted and bloated. The hardest part was not telling anyone I was pregnant because I did feel the change in my body, but chances of miscarriage are highest until 13 weeks pregnant, so I had to keep it on the DL for a while. At the same time, it didn’t even feel real because the fetus is so small, you’re just walking around knowing this thing is growing inside you but at the same time felt like nothing was happening.
The second trimester is definitely when things started to ramp up. I finally started showing at around 15 weeks, my bump nice and low. My clothes no longer fit since I'm a high-waisted-everything kinda girlie, started getting hungrier, boobs still hurting, breaking out more thanks to hormonal acne, constant heartburn, and started panicking about all the ways motherhood was going to change me forever.
I was worried about losing my friends and becoming isolated, being too tired for anything and everything, all the changes my body will go through and knowing it will never be the way it used to be, “letting myself go,” postpartum and how to handle the myth of bouncing back, how motherhood was going to change my marriage dynamic, whether or not my child would love me, whether or not they would be a good person in the world, all the things to be worried about and more. It’s scary knowing that the decision to bring a person into this world will change me forever, but I love that it forces me to embrace change, regardless of what it looks like. It forces me to be completely open to any and all possibilities and letting go of what small idea of control I have. Also, knowing that I’m blessed enough to not do it alone, and to know that I have the best husband and teammate in the world gives me so much solace, not to mention my entire village of a family who is SO excited for me, and all my friends who are already lined up for tia/tio duties.
As you can imagine, pregnancy brings about a lot of stress that is only highlighted once you have a countdown to your due date going off every day. However, in this later stage of pregnancy (26 weeks as of this writing!) I have found a renewed sense of empowerment in my personhood. Dealing with financial stress, work stress, emotional stress, physical stress, and more, knowing that a human is going to come out of me and I will be guiding their growth in the world makes me feel like a bad bitch girl de las 90s, and if I can do that, then nothing seems impossible.
