Member-only story
“Childbirth May Be Painful” and Other Joys of Pregnancy
It’s no bed of roses having a kid …
Mike and I were married about five years when I started wanting to have a baby. He wasn’t ready, so I worked on him for another five years until he decided he was ready, too. This is back in the day (late 80s/early 90s) when a working class couple could buy a house and have a baby.
But I digress. When Mike decided he was ready, I stopped taking birth control, and we started “trying.”
Me being me, I told most, if not all, of my friends about the blow-by-blow … in this case … not pregnant yet, not yet, not this time, etc … We’d been “trying” for about six months when I was sitting in my corner office at Family Service along with my friend Faye. She had just learned she was pregnant.
“Faye, I’m getting discouraged,” I said. She gave me a self-satisfied look like “Well, it wasn’t a big problem for me and Steve …”
She assured me that it hadn’t really been long enough to be concerned about any problems.
“Gee, I wish I could get some energy,” I said. “I feel almost like I have the flu …”
“You’re pregnant,” she said.
And she was so, so right.
