I bleat as I bloat

(Excerpt from the diary of a teen mother)

The worst thing about pregnancy is that you pee every time you sneeze (in addition to every time you cough, or breathe really hard, or sigh, or screw your eyes to figure out an iota of substance in the ‘Wild Elephant’ billboards fifty metres in front of you…)
It has come to affect me so much, that I now carry an extra pair of underwear and hope in every fibre of the universal trait that I wouldn’t ever get in an accident and have someone open my bag and check out the hideous grey wreck three times bigger than an average woman’s.

I am nineteen and pregnant... and look it.
Yes, it was an accident and no, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.

My back aches, my breastbone aches, my shoulders ache and my (ahem) down there also aches. I’ve transformed into this bundle of aches and pains.
I can’t run, I cant jump I cant play volley…. I cant walk down the lane to get Tipi Tip, which apparently has Ajinomoto in it and that, I have been told, is lethal for my baby, and “would you please stop eating it or you’re going to mess everything up?”.
But amazingly, I feel no grudge, no anger and absolutely no regrets at all for having the baby.

It is amazing how considerably ‘mellowed’ I’ve got ever since I had him in my life…it’s a ‘him’ today… and yeah, I can tell because I’m the mother(Hell, I’m a mother now and I might as well use the term to my benefit once in a while)…
And I’ve caught him move too… it’s amazing… like a whale breaking the surface of water… I can do nothing but stare at my tummy endlessly for hours on end.
And Google “Unusual Persian, African and Arabian names” for the little rat.

I am highly attached to it. I imagine him at one, two, three and picture how adorable he’ll be. That’s all I know… that he’ll be one of the most adorable kids I’ve ever seen…. His features are a blur. In those rare moments of realization, when sense kicks into me, I merge his father’s and my appearance together and come up with a sort of distorted beard-y version of a kid and it freaks me out so much that I stop and resume my face-less, chubby-bodied kid daydream.

Sometimes I get all pensive and wonder if the world will be a better place for him, if politicians will learn to squander for the poor and if my child will ever take me seriously.
Sometimes I get all hung up on the tiny details of my own childhood and wonder if they will ever reflect in my baby.
Will he love animals and equally love pinching their tails? Will he look both smart and lost at the same time? Will he master the art of talking his way out of situations?
Sometimes I wonder if I would want my child to take after me...

Getting married (and staying married), is not the big deal. The bigger deal is when you are responsible for the material and intellectual nourishment of a kid. The bigger deal is when you have to be the kid’s ears, eyes and nose (and buttocks) for like the better part of the first decade of his life.
The bigger deal is when you have to stop going to college and help the kid out with homework, boycott regularly watched and memorized and watched again reruns of SpongeBob for a few hours of shut-eye knowing that you’ll need to bank in every bit of sleep you can get.
Yes, I’ve been warned and how do I feel?
Not worried, amazingly. I have currently adopted the stance of a trekker, treating the future as adventure and welcoming it whole-heartedly.

I love my baby. I can’t wait for him to come out.
But I cannot, cannot stand to think about the whole delivery process… can it be anything but gory and blood-drenched?
And can people please stop asking me if I dread it or not?