Pregnancy Is A Real Stretch
Many people have made the observation that art imitates life. Someone revised this later to point out that sometimes life imitates art… and lately that has certainly been the case for me. Four years ago I created the character of Tammie Jean, a pregnant coffee shop waitress delivering her southern fried wisdom on her morning break.
These days my real life is now reflecting my “art.” At 7 and a-half months pregnant, the lessons of Tammie Jean have remained true to me and I find her words coming to mind so often. Words like:
It’s hard to work when you’re pregnant. Swelling is a full time job. I could just stay home on the couch and watch everything get bigger. Everything. Did I say everything? I meant to say, everything! My hands are swelling, my feet are swelling and my emotions are swelling. There’s a hormonal tsunami in here.
It’s important to switch to decaf, but most women don’t know why—it’s so you don’t end up in jail on assault charges before you have a baby.
And what is it about being pregnant that makes everybody feel like they can touch your stomach? I guess some women don’t mind this—but they have wrecked it for the rest of us. I like Home Depot and I like the nice man in the paint department, but I can’t figure out for the life of me why he just reaches out and touches my stomach. I mean his belly is twice as big as mine, but I don’t feel the need to touch it.
And I will admit, for those of you that I know are thinking it, that yes—it’s harder being pregnant than it is playing the role of someone who is pregnant. Not that I would have argued that before, but you can rest assured I’m learning these lessons VERY personally. Because these days, the pregnancy belly doesn’t come off and the swelling doesn’t go away, and no matter what kind of actor I am, my shoes do not fit when I fly on an airplane.
For the first few months I didn’t notice too many changes. I felt a little like I was car sick all the time. Then I started getting thicker around the waist and other areas and suddenly… wham! I became a Guernsey cow wearing a basketball and walking on two loaves of bread for feet. What happened? I’ve now put away all my jeans and heels and cute tops in favor of elastic pants, velcro shoes and a camping tent!
And my wallet is stretching too. I had a very hard time breaking the news to my husband that I needed to take out a loan to have the baby. We definitely have been bombarded with the new material needs of motherhood. It’s pretty overwhelming, all the things you need, or think you need for a baby. Car seats and diaper bags, maternity clothes and cribs, strollers and blankets, tensies of onesies, bibsies and bobsies, and a partridge in a pear tree. Thank goodness for the first loving soul that thought of “showering” new mothers with lovely gifts—I believe she was given sainthood for keeping the financial peace in homes everywhere.
But the best kind of stretching isn’t what’s happening on the ultrasound, although that’s pretty amazing, it is what’s happening in my heart. I haven’t even met the little guy yet but thinking about him takes my breath away… did I mention it’s a boy? Yep, as Bill Cosby would say, “we saw the stem on the apple.” And underneath the giant water balloons that have replaced my breasts, is a heart that stretches with every poke of his elbow and kick of his little feet and with every thought of what it will be like to be his mother.
And these days, even though I’m not acting, I have a sense that I’m playing the greatest role of my life. And what gives me hope about embracing motherhood after 40 years is finding that there is flexibility inside me that I have never known – an ability to stretch and grow in ways that I never thought I could.
And something tells me I’m going to need that understanding in the days and years ahead. Seems to me that this is true for each of us, pregnant or not, that we can stretch and grow more than we can imagine. This could mean a lot to our marriages and families, our tired ways, our well-rehearsed arguments—any area in which we could use some really good stretching.
I’m Nicole Johnson, with a little hope for the daily grind.
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