The amount of Googling a pregnant person does cannot be overstated. Almost all of the posts in my online due date group started with, “Is it normal…??” When you’re pregnant, the answer is usually yes.
Yes, it’s normal to get bloody noses & have toothaches & be insanely thirsty. It’s normal for your nose to get visibly wider, both your shoe size and eyesight to change, and a bunch of other just weird/ gross/ foreign things to happen to your body because you’re cooking an entire person.
It seems most of the “what is happening?!?!” freak outs can be attributed to the pregnancy fact that your body is literally creating and circulating at least 50% more blood than normal. All those super visible veins you couldn’t see beneath your skin anymore? So much more blood flow now!
Unfortunately, the “am I dying or am I just a parent now” questions don’t end after birth. Don’t underestimate the amount of truly bizarre things that will come out of your body postpartum. My baby turns seven months old this week, and just this morning I was like, “What IS that?!?!” in regards to my own body. The glamour train does not stop rolling, my friends.
In honor of my college roommate’s kid turning one this month (a baby I’ve yet to meet! Thanks, pandemic!) I’ll leave you with one of my friend’s favorite sayings. NORMALIZE IT. Specifically, in her case, she wants to normalize “the size of the pads they send you home from the hospital with.” She has a photo of her lil’ newborn bub laying next to one of the postpartum pads from the hospital, and they’re the same size. When I showed the picture to my (dear, sweet, naive because I hadn’t yet given birth) husband, he assumed it was a pee pad the hospital had given her to put the baby on. Lololol nope– it’s basically a placemat she has to wear around to catch the insides falling out of her.
Things I Wish I Knew 