Pregnancy is wild. Childbirth is even wilder. Babies are the wildest.

My husband and I decided to start a family a little over a year ago and we now have a beautiful 6 month old baby boy named Morgan. I spent a good number of years fully convinced that I did not want to have kids. Not for any particular reason, I just couldn’t see myself as a mother. I eventually got to a place where I felt as though I could go either way, with or without. I am no longer in that place.

Finding out I was pregnant was a strange experience in that it didn’t feel like reality but at the same time I believed it, if that makes any sense. I took multiple tests so I was pretty sure, but I was also in a weird dissociated mental state for some reason. My responses to reading the first several tests were “huh” and “whoa” and then “okay.” I was nervous about telling my husband and my parents. Just saying it out loud felt strange I guess. There’s this weird phenomenon where millennials don’t feel like adults so I was also possibly struggling with feeling like a pregnant teenager at 29.

Pregnancy is not for the impatient. It takes so long. There are all of these milestones you have to reach and literally the only way to get to each of them is to wait. Torture. Like, the earliest you can find out you’re pregnant is when you’re 4 weeks along, but then you have to wait until week 8 to see a doctor and confirm the pregnancy. Then you have to wait until week 12 for a certain risk percentage to drop below 3%. After that you have to wait until week 20 for the anatomy scan to make sure the baby is growing and developing as expected. You can also find out the gender at this point if you haven’t already. All of that waiting gets you to the halfway point. This is when I started to feel more at peace about everything, but also started experiencing some physical discomfort, and of course the waiting just continues. They say that by week 28 you’re even more in the clear health-wise, because you really don’t want to go into labor before then. By week 37 you’re considered full term but its ideal to make it all the way to week 40, and no longer than 41.

My early symptoms lasted about three months and were mostly nausea off and on throughout the day, appetite loss and extreme fatigue. I’m so thankful that it wasn’t worse than that. Some women have intense symptoms that last a long time. The good thing about those early symptoms is that even though they can make you pretty uncomfortable, miserable even, they hold your attention in such a way that you aren’t really worried about anything else. Toward the end of pregnancy its the same kind of situation. It was for me, anyway. I was waking up multiple times a night and needing to either use the bathroom or reposition myself from laying on one side to the other. My hips hurt so bad all the time, I don’t even know how to explain it. I felt like I could barely breathe a lot of the time and my hands, feet and face were pretty swollen by the end of my 2nd trimester. I was actually asked if I had gotten lip filler at one point, but all of that was so distracting that it didn’t leave much room in my brain for anxious thoughts, and the irritability it caused just made me want to go into labor as soon as possible.

The second trimester was where I struggled with anxiety and intrusive thoughts the most. I was so concerned that I was going to eat or drink something that would harm the baby, get sick, get in a car accident or tumble down a staircase, all of which are possible but unlikely and not worth thinking about all the time. There was also lot of paranoia about eating sushi, deli meat, soft cheese, unwashed produce, undercooked meat or eggs, unpasteurized dairy, herbal teas, alcohol, too much caffeine, too much tuna, etc. The dietary restrictions are a lot to live by and the possible consequences of not adhering to them are rare but terrifying. I don’t think women who have babies and do everything within their power to take care of themselves get enough credit. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life both physically and mentally. Maybe some women go through the entire process without a care in the world, but I think that’s less common.

Waiting for labor to happen was torture, physically and mentally. Once it finally started, I was beyond ready. Nervous, but so ready. At about 9:30pm one day after my due date, my water started leaking and we headed to the hospital. Contractions started in the car and progressively became extremely painful. I endured them for a few hours before I decided to get an epidural. Part of me wanted to be superwoman and refuse medication but the other part of me was in a massive amount of pain and afraid that I wouldn’t have the strength, pain tolerance or energy to push after enduring that pain for an extended period of time. What I hated about the epidural was that I literally couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. I was just completely numb for 10 hours and because of that whenever it was time to push I couldn’t tell if I was actually pushing. I knew that would be the case beforehand if I decided to be medicated, but it was still frustrating. My doctor had to tell me when to push and whether I was actually pushing or not. It was bizarre, but it only took about 45 minutes to meet my son with no complications and I’m very thankful for that.

Although I didn’t have any actual complications, I did have a mild scare shortly before my son was born. His heart rate was dropping and my doctor was concerned enough to tell me that if he wasn’t here within the next couple of contractions I might need assistance by forceps or vacuum, or possibly even a cesarean section. I don’t know which of those they would have resorted to but even as foggy as I was those words terrified me. I said a quick prayer and within the next few contractions he arrived. Aside from having divine intervention and peace that surpasses understanding, having my mom and my husband in the delivery room the entire time was so helpful and comforting. That, in addition to having the best doctor and delivery nurse I could ask for was such a blessing to me.

The postpartum period that followed was exhausting and at times overwhelming, but everything after that is so indescribably precious and those earliest moments with your tiny human are fleeting. I’ve spent the last six months just trying to soak it all in, and would bottle it up if I could.