Don’t compare yourself to others

No doubt, you have heard about a hundred different birth/pregnancy stories. Some may have reassured you and other may have scared the heck out of you. It is amazing how incredibly personal people will get with a perfect stranger when it comes to being pregnant or talking about their delivery. You mostly likely will have had at least conversation with a complete stranger sitting on a bench in the park or at the food court in the mall about some sort of otherwise totally private pregnancy experience, like your hemorrhoids. There is something about this one equalizer among woman that seems to make even the shyest of woman chatty Cathys. While this is all great female bonding and what not, you need to take it all with a grain of salt. You simply cannot spend your pregnancy comparing yourself to others’ pregnancies. For one thing you are not them, so you have a different pain threshold, you have a different perspective of your pregnancy and you have a different support system. For some strange reason, woman and men alike tend to embellish and exaggerate the day their little one was born. Whether it is foolish pride or foggy memories, often the stories are not always completely accurate. Either the nursing staff is cast in an unflattering light, or the pain was unbearable or totally nothing. Some of the worst stories may come from your own family, which can be the scariest. You have to remember that no two pregnancies are the same, even with one woman. All four of mine, while they followed the same general schedule, had very distinct differences. Like my second had the most morning sickness, while my third was the most tiring. You simply have to take the many anecdotes that you will hear as just that – anecdotes. If you compare yourself to others you will undoubtedly begin to feel less than adequate about some part of your pregnancy. There are lots of different types of mothers out there, and while not all methods are great, as long as you love and care for your child and do your best to provide the necessities of life for them, you are doing a good job.

Word of the Week

umbilical cord – noun –   a cord or funicle connecting the embryo or fetus with the placenta of the mother and transporting nourishment from the mother and wastes from the fetus.

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