There are approximately 7 bajillion books about pregnancy out there, all filled with oodles of facts, figures, and if you’re lucky, photos (oh, the photos!). I got a couple of them while I was pregnant, and actually did find a lot of useful and helpful information. You can easily experience sensory overload though, trying to plow through everything you’re told you just MUST do or have in preparation for that small human that will soon be coming into your life, or everything you MUST NOT do or have so as to make sure said small human’s entry into this world is just absolutely perfect. (fyi, that entry is rarely “perfect”, whatever that means, so just hang loose. if l&d doesn’t go exactly as you had hoped/planned, don’t fret. as long as that baby gets out here safe and sound, that’s what matters most)
But what I was always more interested in during my pregnancy was everything those books weren’t going to tell me. Like all the really weird, gross stuff that you’ll never find in print, yet is fairly common knowledge to almost every woman who has ever given birth. So that’s what I always asked my friends who had children – what do I really need to know about all this?
With all the new babies right now and my increasing thoughts about when we’ll try to give D a sibling, I find myself looking back on those 38 weeks and 6 days last year more and more frequently. I’ve been trying to remember all the weird, gross stuff I experienced that I was totally unaware would happen going into it. Maybe so I’m better prepared next time, maybe to share with anyone else who’s pregnant right now or trying to get pregnant, or maybe just because. No matter the reason, I’ve decided to start this little section of the blog called “Things they don’t tell you about pregnancy” to house all the weird, gross stuff that I encountered.
These tidbits will be in no particular order, neither chronologically through the stages of pregnancy nor of importance. I’ll just share them as I think of them, which = randomly (kind of like everything else i put on here). So if you’re pregnant, trying to get pregnant, have ever been pregnant and can relate, or have no plans to ever get pregnant and just want to see what crazy shit I’m going to come up with now, hopefully I can give you a little insight into what’s really (might probably?) going to happen to your body. If not, then maybe you can get a few laughs out of hearing what happened to me.
Let’s talk about hair. I have long hair, and shed a fair amount when I wash and brush it. I’m constantly sweeping up hair off the bathroom floor and pulling the wads of hair out of the drain after my showers. So I was blown away by the end of my pregnancy when I wouldn’t lose a single hair no matter how many times I brushed or washed it. NOT ONE! This was completely foreign to me, because I’m not kidding when I say thousands of wigs could have been made with the hair I’ve shed during my lifetime. It was awesome. I never had to clean out the drain, I never had to sweep up the floor, I never had to worry if I had stray hairs on my shoulders or back, and I was no longer finding random pieces of hair on the floor around the house. Long, shiny, thick, luxurious hair was the order of the day. And the prenatal vitamins I’d been taking since months before I was even pregnant helped it grow that much faster, too.
Fast forward to about 3 months after I had D, and the party came to a screeching halt. Not only did I go back to shedding, but hair was falling out like there was an evacuation order atop my head. And at a rapid pace! Handfuls upon handfuls would come out in the shower, and the bathroom floor looked like I was standing on a small rug when I got done brushing. And if I used a hair dryer? Oh forget it. The bathroom was covered in a hair sweater. It was disgusting. I hate stray hair, especially hair on the floor, so this annoyed the crap out of me. Plus, I swear I could feel my hair thinning. It was awful! What happened to my lustrous locks? Am I going to be bald soon?? I had heard other women mention that their hair did start to fall out after pregnancy, but I had no idea it was going to be like this! I just figured it’d go back to my normal shedding amount, since I had more hair than most of the people who told me about this. Surely my regular waterfall of loose hairs would equal what they referred to as “hair falling out”. Nope. My hair fell.out. Anywhere, anytime, and all over the place. I hated it. I even had to warn my stylist that the sink was going to be horribly full of hair after she washed it since I’d just had a baby and I apparently needed Rogaine.
Fortunately, there is a light at the end of this hairy tunnel. It does stop. For me it was around the 6 month mark post-delivery. Finally the clumps of hair got smaller and smaller until the shedding was back to a normal, much more manageable level. But I was really worried there for a bit. My pony tail was thinner, and I swore that my hairline had receded. I am happy to report, however, that it all goes back to normal. Too bad the grays that fell out still grew back gray. Ah well, that’s why I pay my stylist. At least now she has a full head of hair to work with again.