I don’t identify with the term #yummymummy ! While some women are blessed and seem to shed their pregnancy weight and their inhibitions when it came to posing for before and after pregnancy snaps, I definitely wasn’t one of them. It took me a long time and continuous efforts over the years and a lot of hard work to reach where I am today(my first child was born 10 years back). But that’s not the story that I want to share today.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I loved being pregnant. Pregnancy was the one time in my life when I could guiltlessly eat whatever I wished for and I gulped everything that crossed my path or even my fantasy without blinking an eye. Yes, I am one of those people who fantasize about food.
So as expected I piled on kilos, 20 kilos to be precise and started waddling instead of walking. Sitting down and then trying to stand up became a herculean task. Well never trust friends when you want honest advice or at least don’t trust my friends! While I was growing, they would come to me and pull my cheeks, calling me cute. No one bothered to tell me that losing all this weight will be a nightmare one day. So yes yummy in my case would be the yummy food that I was gorging on every day.
I somehow believed that I will be back to my size once I deliver. No sooner had I delivered a good 3.85 kilos of bundle-of-joy and a good 2.5 kilos of the placenta, I wanted to check myself out. I was almost excited to head to the mirror. I was in for a shock when I finally got to check myself out, I looked no less than five months pregnant. Ladies who are pregnant please don’t be delusional, only celebrities like Shilpa Shetty get their flat tummies back in no time, you and me get stretch marks and a uterus which we wish we can staple!!
Well, my misery didn’t end there, having delivered normally I was denied a private room in the prestigious Breach Candy hospital! I was just too exhausted, sleepy and could kill for a few hours of soundless sleep. To make things worse I had to share the room with three other women. One in labor pain, one whose baby’s sleep hours were exactly opposite to mine and the third one plotting with her sister on how she will keep crying in discomfort in front of her husband so that everyone forgets that she delivered a baby girl and not a baby boy. While I did sympathize with her, I could not but ponder that educated individuals of her family could have such a miopic view on life that she had to resort to such trickery. It did work well in her favor, good for her I thought.
I almost had to beg my husband to take me home, I really was not sleeping. My baby had been kept in the nursery which was a long walk from my room and I was expected to walk(waddle) from one end of the corridor to another in my stitches(oh yes, you do get a few stitches even if you deliver normally, another surprise I got at the delivery table).
Well, home did not exactly get me the respite I expected. I was sandwiched between my mom and my ma-in-law’s parenting laws(one from the North and the other from the South of India). One wanted to lie down for 40 days, the other told me to go back to my day to day activities and exercise as I had a normal delivery. I was expected to balance their expectations and suddenly become this calendar mom who could feed, clean and nurture her new baby, who btw decided to sleep for just six to eight hours a day and only cry, feed and take a dump when he was awake. Honestly, I did not know what hit me. Suddenly, my universe had changed and I had no control over it. In a week, I had deep, black, sagging eye bags. I really wondered why did no one emphasise on the need for an after delivery class. I hated those calender moms, I was nowhere close to one.
I was almost ready to give up when my hubby stepped up. He usually needs to be told things, but this time, he announced that he was taking me and our baby out for dinner. This was the first time after we had the baby that we had a decent conversation. I ate some wonderful food, laughed a bit and for once I got a hint of my old life back. We looked at our baby, he was sleeping soundly in his bassinet while we were having dinner.
Doesn’t he look like an angel?
I exclaimed and my hubby nodded in agreement. I knew then that there was a lot to learn but if we were in this together, we will figure it out.
p.s.Oh! Btw this is me now, just in case you thought I was giving an excuse for not working out. But this has taken patience and time.
“I’m writing about my wonderful journey of pregnancy for the#YummyMummy blogging activity at BlogAdda in association with Marico Bio Oil.”
