“You terrible person”

Tess Hoens' life is amazing, but getting pregnant didn't go as she had thought. Because there is already enough of a facade and because honesty helps, she writes about how her pregnancy is going. This week she talks about how she feels about her body.

‘Wow, you’re getting so big, huh?’ She touches my belly. I’m now about fourteen weeks pregnant and I think it’s mostly just bloating. I lean back a bit from her reaching hand. First of all, because corona has just started and the song lyrics ‘one and a half meters, don’t come into my aura, bitch’ keep playing in my head all day, and secondly because I don’t feel comfortable at all with my belly and especially not with the idea that she’s going to stroke it.

Women who were pregnant and then complained about getting bigger and how their figure changed, I hated them. I tried everything to get pregnant and I couldn’t stand those who were and then complained about it. You’re pregnant! Of course, you’re going to get a little bigger, of course, you’re going to change. There’s life growing inside you. But now it’s my turn and I have to be honest. Every time I look in the mirror and see a strange half-puffed belly and my whole waist (what I had there) has disappeared, I don’t feel good. I even feel a bit disgusted by my body. Then I’m disgusted by the fact that I feel so dissatisfied with the body that is finally doing what I wanted so beautifully and that I’ve become one of those women I despised so much. I start to cry (please don’t forget the hormones) and shout to my boyfriend that I’m so ugly. He says once that it’s nonsense but can’t be very patient about it either. And we’re talking about the most patient man on earth. ‘Yeah, come on, it’s not going to be that I have to hear for nine months that you feel fat, huh, you’re just going to get bigger, you know.’

I’m lying in bed and feeling guilty about my emotional outburst. Later, this will cause God, or whoever is up there, to punish me and end the pregnancy anyway. You terrible person, he/she will think, for two and a half years I’ve been doing my best to bring the miracle of life into you and now you’re crying. And that thought makes me cry again. Oh, I must be pregnant.