Pregnancy diaries – 1

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Some pearls of wisdom on the second trimester of pregnancy. A typical sleep cycle of someone who once used to be able to sleep at the drop of the hat..

 10:30PM Slightly sleepy, despite the Vishnu Sahasranamam that is blaring (recommended by mom, mom-in-law,neighbour, neighbours’ grandma etc. so that the baby is not half as dysfunctional as you are and learns all the good things before it comes out and gets corrupted, eventually). Personally, you would rather that it listen to Preeti Sagar nursery rhymes because you already have notions of baby being a genius and spouting “Baba black sheep” the day it is born. You shudder because realize that you are going to end up institutionalized, if you continue to be so competitive and thrust all your unfulfilled ambitions on the little thing that is  now merely the size of a banana .

You toss and turn trying to find a position that challenges the laws of gravity. You try different permutations and combinations for fifteen minutes, before hitting the jackpot. You doze off sometime around 11.

12:00AM You wake up feeling weird and woozy. REM cycle rudely interrupted courtesy Pee break: 1. You curse yourself for drinking so much water before going to bed. Aimless surfing – you google Aishwarya’s  pregnancy pics(GOSH!) ; log into FB twice, gmail thrice ,goodreads five times and blog-hop randomly and still feel bored ; make 4 aborted attempts at reading  the simplest book lying around (A few days earlier you had picked up a  Murakami and had stared blankly at the black and white  patterns on the pages for ten minutes, wondering what in the hell he was talking about. Having become wiser, you decide to pick up Nanny Diaries or similar alleged-fluff with pink covers.)

Sleep continues to elude you. You end up giving the neighborhood dogs company- yet again( by now you know more about these dogs than the owners themselves)  and wonder why Caesar is groaning piteously today. Maybe something he ate last night didn’t agree with him ? 

1:30AM Sleep trying to visit again. Plus, by now you are bored with the book and “really” want to make an honest effort to go back to sleep. Finally you manage to find a comfortable position after much tossing and turning. You have managed to reclaim your right on five pillows in the household, so that others don’t have any pillows for themselves. They surrender the pillows to you without a fight because a) they are sleeping and you aren’t  b) you are pregnant and  therefore your needs(read as baby’s needs) always come before theirs.

2:45AM Wake up in the middle of REM again feeling ravenously hungry.WTH? Several apples and slices of breads later, you feel less zombie-like, though you know that this binging is going to hurt you because you have been warned about assorted diabetic relatives in the family and you being a sitting duck for becoming a diabetic yourself. Also lately you have not been able to recognize yourself in the mirror , but are safe in the knowledge that a thinner version of yourself lurks below all those layers of fat.

More tossing and turning . Pee break : 2 and 3 ; Aimless surfing  – Google “How to sleep + pregnancy + pee breaks ”, rough calories of items ingested a few hours back. Groan- 400  ; two aborted attempts to read a book(Nanny diaries, again); one unsuccessful attempt at trying to do the Hindu crossword(you  feel sad that you have managed to crack only “three down” ); one attempt at the Times Sudoku (  you feel happy that here at least you’ve managed to fill a few “dabbas”).You briefly try to get some writing done,only to realize that  words have clotted in your brain .You give up because you don’t want your novel to be  bought and read by only five people (three of whom will hate it, but won’t say anything bad about it because they are family). You get bored. 

4:00AM Sleep again. Ah!..

5:00AM REM again. Pee break 4. “What the F*beep* am I drinking to pee so much?”you wonder. You apologize to the baby profusely that you “swore in your head”. Your mother,mother-in-law,relatives,neighbor, neighbour’s aunty, flower-seller etc have already warned you that the baby can sense all bad things going inside you .. You wonder if the baby knows how good it felt to swear (if only it was in your head).You sigh because you know that soon you can no longer utter such words, whereas everyone around you will be having a gala time saying the aforementioned *beep* word. You get bored.

This time nothing works anyway and you finally end up staring at the patterns on the ceiling. Suddenly it hits you that one patch looks like Australia and you feel this uncontrollable itch to wake someone up and share the news. You know you can’t , so you text  the hubby and hope and pray that the noise wakes him up. After all, you realize that this could be the single biggest discovery since electricity and  more importantly , nobody is entitled to more than three hours of sleep (especially if it is your husband). 

6:00 AM Some semblance of sleep. Scratch,whoosh,scratch,whoosh- Sounds of your mother washing the household entrance for drawing  the kolam. Groan. Sounds of newspaper-wala, milk-man and sundry all out on a secret mission to rouse you. Pee break 5. Ravenous again. You hang around the kitchen hoping the mother will feel pity (you put on your most miserable look, but you really don’t have to try too hard. Because by now you are a zombie and look like one too) .You already know she always does and will move the heaven and earth to make you (read baby ,again) something nutritious, healthy and low-fat. Translated as “Ughhh!”

Belly full again, you give up trying to fall asleep , because the  doc and five different pregnancy books that you peruse on a daily basis warns you not to lay down for at least two hours after a meal. Groan. You make a move (stealthily) on the day’s newspaper before the dad confiscates all printed matter that remotely  says “Hindu” and snap groggily when he asks you “Did you sleep well last night?” just like he asks you every morning.

7:00AM Snore finally for a few hours of shut-eye.

DISCLAIMER : Before any radical mahila-mukthi types spams me with comments of what a pig  I am for writing something bad about pregnancy, let me assert that everything has been written in jest and it does NOT mean that I don’t realize how wonderful pregnancy really is 🙂  Also , I am terribly sleep-deprived, so adjust please.