it's uterus not uter-you

We Are Pregnant!

Photo: Ragnar Schmuck/Corbis

We found out yesterday that Chrissy Teigen and John Legend are going to have a baby. As they announced on Instagram, “John and I are so happy to announce that we are pregnant :) “

Naturally this brought us right back to that time when we were pregnant. We were so thrilled to find out that we were with child! Remember how we went to the first checkup and we looked at the sonogram and we heard the baby’s heartbeat together for the first time? That was nice. The fact that the heartbeat was coming from somewhere very close to the large intestine belonging to just one of us didn’t really occur to us then. We were just excited to hear it! We were having a baby! Hooray for us!

It was strange, though, when we started to vomit every morning, but only one of us would actually go into the bathroom and stick her face in the toilet and hurl. Why would only one of us experience symptoms of pregnancy if we were both pregnant? This was something unsettling that we’d never really known about pregnancy before we were actually pregnant.

Pretty soon after that, we also started to feel weak and enfeebled every day, almost like we were experiencing a three-month-long hangover. Yet whenever we talked about how wretched and queasy we felt around the clock, all the fucking time, one of us would get really teary-eyed and frustrated over it, and the other one would just sit there like everything was pretty okay. Why was one of us so unfazed by these constant feelings of nausea and despair that we were both feeling? We were learning so many things about pregnancy that we’d never known before! We were in this together, forever-style. Everything would turn out just fine in the end.

We tried to remember that when one of us started to get round and bloated and stopped being able to eat very much at one time without experiencing heartburn that can only be described as apocalyptic. Remember how whenever we described the heartburn as apocalyptic, one of us would close her eyes and moan to underscore the point, and the other one would shrug and polish off the rest of the chili-cheese fries, washing it down with a six pack of beer? That was a pretty unnerving time in our pregnancy, wasn’t it?

We were also starting to get really overwhelmed by all of the emotions and responsibilities awaiting us. We were very concerned about breast-feeding, how that would go, and who would get the baby’s room ready, because it wasn’t really ready yet. Sure, there were boxes and piles of gifts around from the baby shower, but it wasn’t SET UP, it wasn’t READY TO GO, and it needed to be FUCKING READY because this baby of ours, it was going to fucking show up any fucking day now and the goddamn ONESIES needed to be laundered and folded, preferably by someone who could FUCKING MOVE WITHOUT GOING INTO TRACTION.

But we didn’t launder and fold the fucking socks, did we? No, we went out for a fucking beer with our buddies — well, one of us did, anyway, while the other one of us stayed at home and cried and cried and then daydreamed about calling a moving van and moving every fucking piece of furniture and shred of clothing and box of baby shit out of the house and into a place across town where one of us would never fucking find us, ever, and then we’d be fucking sorry.

Then one of us would come home drunk and the other one of us would toss and turn and dream of murdering us in our sleep. Our baby was moving around by then, but curiously, she was only kick-boxing and karate-chopping one of our ribs and spleens and small intestines, and only one of our bodies was frying up like it was 120 degrees in the house, making just one of us sweat like a fucking warthog under a broiler, while the other one of us slept like … well, like a baby that wasn’t our own unborn hyperactive assassin child.

Finally, we went into labor! Remember how we were so excited but then the pain got worse and worse and we were writhing and screaming in the hospital, and then one of us gently suggested that we do some breathing exercises and mentioned something about a fucking birth plan and pulled out a sheet of paper with some fucking idealistic horse shit written on it, and the other one of us ripped up the sheet of paper and told us to go fuck ourselves?

Aw, remember how we demanded an epidural, even though it flew in the face of what was written on that ripped-up sheet of paper? And remember how our baby started having heart decelerations, so we had to have a C-section, but only one of us got split open like a pig on a spit while the other one stood by like a wuss, complaining that all of that blood made him feel faint?

Remember when we finally heard our baby cry for the first time? Remember that glorious sound? And then they brought us our baby and we looked into her pretty eyes and we said … we said ….

“MY baby. My beautiful baby girl.” And I breast-fed her! And it worked! It was amazing. It was a miracle. I was so happy.

You were there, too, I’m pretty sure.

We Are Pregnant!