Vessel
"Pregnancy is bullshit," I mutter, carefully lowering myself into a chair at the party I'm hosting.
What I mean is, there's always something. I feel I should have been better prepared, but also that I couldn't have been. And while there is a righteous instinct that rebels against medical systems that prioritize the health of the fetus instead of giving choices to the mother, my own body does this too.
My immune system is suppressed. Baby takes the nutrients it needs directly from my innards and leaves me the leftovers. And now, the physical structures of my body are shifting to accommodate the still-distant labor and delivery.
Imagine you've just spent a couple of months so fatigued it makes you nauseous at all times. You are undernourished and sometimes your helpful body receives hard-won calories by throwing them back.
When this finally ends, your body starts to gain weight rapidly, more than ever before, but instead of the weight gain distributing across your body, it front-loads you while also internally compressing your diaphragm. Breathing is tight. Your biomechanics, always important, are now critical to supporting this additional load.
But at the same time as you need to support extra weight, your body releases relaxin that loosens your joint structures. Those big long muscles that used to strap in the front of your body? The abs split in the middle to make room for your expansion. Now you have to support the weight much less efficiently, with your transverse abdominals.
Try it: belly breath in, belly breath out. Put your hand below your belly button while you breathe the air out, until you feel it tighten. That's how you strengthen, here. It's in several of my YouTube pregnancy workout channels. With such little resistance, how on earth will that ever get strong?
But you have to do it, it's critical, because your pelvis is changing shape. There's normally an anterior tilt in your pelvis that bends your tailbone out unless you consciously tilt it forward to flatten your lower back. That's a good exercise to improve your posture and reduce load on your spine.
Pregnancy exaggerates the anterior tilt, loading the spine even more: a tradeoff that should eventually help the baby come out. It also widens the pelvis. All this shifting around leaves the the joints of the pelvis (one in the front and two in the back) vulnerable to misalignment. Which I now have.
Pelvic girdle pain (PGP) is super common and super painful. There's a stereotype of pregnant women waddling around, leaning back walking while holding their lower backs, relying heavily on railings to get up the stairs. It's from this.
Even without pregnancy, I'm hypermobile, a thing that sounds good but actually means your joints are too loose and your muscles have to make up for it. Now, I can't even do a lunge. Step-ups onto a box are wobbly and difficult. My left sacroiliac joint is way out of whack, and I'm working hard to get it stable when I'm walking, standing, sitting, sleeping.
Maybe it's from the way I cross my legs. Maybe I sit funny. Maybe, I can't help but wonder, if I had done more Pilates instead of lying on the floor feeling awful for weeks...
I have a belly band— maternity objects keep arriving from supportive friends, many of whom plan not to have another kid anytime soon. But although the giant wrapper helps by pretending to be extra transverse abdominals, I have to use it judiciously or I won't strengthen the actual muscles.
I'm finally well. I can eat. I can go out. I'm going sailing tonight. But it's a lot of work, just being a body. When I roll over at night, I have to remember to tighten my core first or my belly will cramp from the weight shift. When I walk, it's more core, pelvic tilt, to walk instead of waddle or I'm just putting extra load on the strained joints.
I'm wearing compression socks at night, but my feet still feel swollen in the morning. I'm doing exercises: back bridges, toe taps, donkey kicks. Conscious loaded movement is how you get alignment back. I can fix it, I think.
When you wake up and your body feels awful, usually the best thing you can do is go back to bed. You can't, in the first trimester, because then you would never get up. At least in the second trimester, there's space to choose: to work on the challenges, or to rest instead.
This morning, I'm back in bed. It was a full weekend, and of course I overdid. But it's worth it, to spend time with far-flung friends. I hosted, but they all pitched in with food, dishes, sweeping. In the middle of the party, it was fine for me to go lay down for a while.
And now I'm here with my books, the day open, the fetus twitching inside of me. I'm tired but not sleepy, belly warm from breakfast, resting. I'll do the exercises today and it will help me feel better. But not yet.
Previous: Selection Bias
