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wo years ago, as I was bleeding out what remained of my miscarried baby, one of my clients asked me when Jeff and I were going to have kids. He then proceeded to guilt me for being selfish; had I been a better person, you see, I would have already inflicted my spawn on the world. Our society's insistence that women keep their pregnancies secret during the first trimester creates some really painful, strange, and awkward situations.
The horrible thing about the first trimester is that it's the time when you're most likely to feel like shit, but least likely to be publicly discussing your pregnancy. So, because pregnancy must be secret because miscarriage must always be a source of shame, pregnant women are stuck suffering in silence. This means we don't talk to each other like we do about, say, yeast infections, so no one knows what the hell to expect or how to cope.
Women's websites capitalize on this ignorance, selling us remedies that don't work, offering us solutions that are nothing but recycled old wives' tales, or insisting that because it's all "hormonal," it's inevitable.
Some of it probably is. But a full trimester in, I've found a handful of things that work. If you have your own brilliant strategies, please feel free to chime in. After all, every pregnant woman is different, and what works for one will not necessarily work for another.
