Stretching Pain and Weight Gain!

For the first four months of my pregnancy I had the nausea that plagued me daily. After that had subsided everyone told me, 'oh, the next few months are nice, your bump won't be too big and you will have your energy back'. Rubbish! You lied, you ALL lied. 

First came the sciatica, which shot pains down my legs, up my back and sometimes up my bum. Some people enjoy pain in the bum, but not me, bum fun is not my bag. My feet hurt so much I had to buy a pair of those slightly unattractive 'FitFlops' which I wore everyday, even when it pissed it down. My bladder had shrunk to the size of a peanut and I had to go to the toilet around eleven times a night. My bump, wasn't all small neat and manageable, it was huge. I waddled around with the knowledge that this was supposed to be the good bit, dreading the next bit. All these things aside, the most annoying one of all was the fact that I couldn't sleep. I am not talking about a bit of tossing and turning and a disturbed nights sleep. I am talking full on insomnia. Not because I lacked tiredness either, it was because I had restless leg syndrome, which is a weird kind of pain like twitching in your legs and the only way to stop it is to move. Instead of having lovely long nights of sleep, I walked around my tiny living/dining room reading anything from a fiction novel to the Argos catalogue. People kept saying 'Ooo you wait until the baby arrives, then you'll be tired', but I knew I would have more sleep when she arrived. Sometimes I was simply too tired to read anything that made sense, so looking at pictures of baby paraphernalia was all I could manage. I can practically quote you a price on anything from Mothercare, Argos or Ikea catalogues of 2010. It was horrendous. I usually had a bath at three a.m. every morning with this lavender bath soak by Original Source. If I ran out it meant I would never sleep again, so you would quite often find me prowling the isles of the 24 hr Tesco's on the wrong side of midnight. A specialist told me that banana's and tonic water could help, so I stocked up on both and found I couldn't sleep if I didn't have a combination of the three. Within a couple of weeks I was on first name terms with the night staff. I was usually pestering someone to get the bath bubbles out of the bottom of a stock cage as it wasn't even on the shelf yet. I think they would have told anyone else to go away in no uncertain terms, but they made allowances on the basis that I was a) heavily pregnant, b) desperate looking, c) pleading with them and sometimes crying. Not to mention the fact that I am pretty sure they thought I was emotionally unhinged. They were spot on!

I was losing it. I think anyone would have, if they had been in my position. Added to my woes was the fact that I was craving fruit and I don't just mean the odd orange, I was eating about ten oranges a day (two big ones, eight little ones), two apples, two bananas, two limes, a lemon and whatever else I could get my hands on. There were frequent trips to Tesco and the veg market. I was still only getting £65 a week and the the fruit addiction was setting me back a bit. If I had been addicted to orange food, I would have been minted like a new leg of lamb. Unfortunately I was growing a baby with very expensive tastes, that to this day still won't eat anything overly processed. I had a decision to make, it was either feed myself and my baby healthy food or pay the T.V. license and water bill. Needless to say, I ran up a big bill with the water board and didn't have a T.V. I did get really fat, some how, from fruit! Judas of a body! I am not so sure if it was a side affect of my circumstances or whether it was just raging hormones, but unbeknown to me, I had turned into a complete and utter bitch. I ripped heads off left right and centre, relatively unprovoked most of the time. I was like a time bomb waiting to go off. Heaven forbid someone gave me the wrong change or brushed past me too quickly. I had grown men reduced to tears and begging for mercy on a daily basis. Everything stressed me out and made me angry, but my sister, who was amazing at dealing with me, maintained that I would be back to my old self when my baby arrived. I had to improve, or I wouldn't have any family left, let alone friends. Even I hated myself. 

So I sleeplessly raged, waddled and widdled through the remainder of my pregnancy and only gained a few little stretch marks here and there... until I went overdue. Then, all of a sudden, it looked like a bear had attacked my guts with freshly sharpened claws and to add insult to injury I started to get pregnancy rash. The rash made me look like I had been stuffed into a bee hive for a couple of hours with some very angry bees. I literally wanted to peel my skin off. It was so uncomfortable, but no creams seemed to help. The best thing I found to ease it just a little, was to lie on my bed with a cold wet towel over me. I had of course tried other things, for example, I read on the Internet that it's good to have an oatmeal bath. So I went to my best friends house and she ran me a bath, but she didn't have oatmeal, so we used Ready Brek. It was the strangest bath I have ever had. After that made no difference but proved entertaining, my friend decided we should try putting some Manuka honey on the particularly sore area which was my legs. She spread the honey on with a spoon and then wrapped my legs in cling film. It looked a bit strange but did sooth it a bit. Later on, my friend's boyfriend dropped me off at home, whilst explaining to me how early he had to get up in the morning and how tired he was. He drove away and I stood outside my flat, in the dark, looking for my keys. Anyone who knows me, knows I am notorious for losing my keys (and phone, especially the phone). I always think I have lost them, but then they always seem to be in the bottom of my over sized, Mary Poppins style, very disorganised handbag. So there I was, legs smothered in honey and wrapped in cling film, locked out, cold and desperate for the toilet. I didn't feel I could call my friends boyfriend because he was so tired, so I rang my sister who was babysitting and had my spare key and asked her to save my bacon instead. As always she came to my rescue without complaint and let me in. I must say, that was one of the most bazaar evenings I have ever had (without being drunk). 

As you can probably gather, I didn't get on very well with pregnancy and I just wanted it over. I was huge by the time that day came and had apparently earned myself the nick name 'big fat Ruth' (which a friend let slip not long ago!) Then I tried to give birth, which was a disaster, but that's another story.....

Summer Sales and Gagging Tales

In the summer, before I got pregnant, I was self employed working as a garden furniture sales person. Unsuccessfully you could say, as within six months of both companies employing me, they both folded, Oops! Not the sales genius I thought I was after all. I didn't like the job, it wasn't really for me, it was boring, but I did like the pay check. It's a little bit like selling snow to eskimo's, apart from snow is, at least, useful. You can melt it, drink it, turn it yellow by peeing on it and make houses out of it, you can't do any of that with garden furniture when its torrential rain outside, or the chairs are blowing half way across your garden and the parasol has done a dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.

People didn't want it and the people that did want it I didn't like. In the shop I was working at for three months, which had an average of two customers per 7.5 hours of being open, I used to get very bored. I watched the whole of Gordan Ramsay's Hell's kitchen, series one to eight and not to mention many other documentaries etc. I also frequented the local cake shop and had my favourite indulgence of the moment which was a prawn and avocado sandwich on granary followed by a massive apple and fresh cream turnover. Needless to say, my arse grew fast, and my body decided one bottom wasn't enough to house my new look and grew me another one, along with some bingo wings and some thunder thighs. Those two customers always, without fail, interrupted my precious cake time! Kevin was a feeder, and most days he cooked me a full english and tried to make me eat vast amounts of other unhealthy crap, but one thing about him, he was very good at cooking (not tarts, but that's another story) and I love eating, so we were suited in that capacity. 

The major problems started when I didn't want to eat anything anymore, he took it personally. For the first four months of my pregnancy, I could only stomach toast and fruit and soup. Anything other than that made me want to vomit. I wasn't someone who did a lot of spewing unless I had drunk my own body weight in vodka, so it came as no surprise to me that I would only feel on the brink of vomiting instead of actually being sick. I am sure it's not any better being sick, but I just wanted a moments relief. It was horrible, and this was where Kevin taunted me the most. I hated the smell of smoke and he refused to smoke outside. I began to really despise him. I think for some people there is a natural rejection of your partner once you have conceived, you don't need them anymore and they appear a bit disgusting. Or, they actually ARE disgusting and you DO actually hate them. Then, you are doomed.

I digress. So after leaving Kevin, having been recently made redundant from the shop with no customers, I am forced to sign on. Yes, I have just left uni, with a first class degree in Art, but can I get a job? No. I was over qualified for most things and under qualified for everything else, there seemed to be nothing in between that would suit a gagging, pregnant, single woman, with a low lying placenta.

To cut a long story short, I gagged my way to the job centre every two weeks to be pretty much laughed at (except by the odd jobs worth, who thought it was necessary to interrogate me as to why I had not been accepted to full time jobs with a belly the same size as a prize winning giant water melon) until I was 28 weeks pregnant, by which time I was HUGE. Just to prove a point once more, I couldn't even sell myself, let alone a bistro set for your courtyard garden

As miserable as the whole experience was, I was still warmed by the fact that I was going to have a lovely little baby. I certainly wasn't warmed by the heating in my flat, there wasn't any. Not that I could have afforded it anyway. For anyone out there who thinks its easy to live off the state, I have only this advice, try it. 

'Rocky on the Wallet'

I went to Bristol later that day, slightly in shock, but also weirdly elated. I knew I was going to have this baby and the fact that I wouldn't entertain any other outcome gave me reason to relax a little. The bit that scared the shit out of me was that I was going to have a baby with a man I recently decided I didn't really like, let alone love! I kept thinking this isn't the way my future is supposed to unfold, I am supposed to fall in love, with someone who isn't, well, a chav.

The amazingly magical part about this day was when I told him we were expecting. As a father of three, I didn't expect him to have the uncontainable excitement of a first time dad but I did expect a bit more than (and I quote) "It's going to be rocky on the wallet". I mean, Jesus, don't bowl me over with your enthusiasm will you!?! He didn't just say it once, he said it about five times, and just incase you aren't quite fluent in 'chav' it roughly translates to, 'this is going to be expensive darling'.

So, I had a little word with myself and decided to try my hardest to make our relationship work. Kevin, on the other hand quit his job, blew smoke in my face, crashed his car and wrote it off, wouldn't visit his children, mocked me constantly and ripped me off financially. He also decided it would be a great idea to take loads of co-codamol on an empty stomach and pretend he was dead, when the ambulance I had rung turned up, he sat up in bed and said, 'why did you call them'? I know what you are thinking... what a twat and you're right. 

All this I managed to take, but when he had purposely used every scrap of anything absorbent for the fourth time that week and failed to replace it and not flushed his latest bowel movement away, I was broken. Sitting on the toilet, dripping dry, I called him to tell him how disgusting he was and that I would be staying with my sister for a week. He didn't like that and told me that if I left he would change the locks. My sisters gathered like the forces of Mordor around me and I was moved out within three hours, two and a half months pregnant. That was the last time I saw him, apart from on t.v., when he burnt a tart, but that's another story!