Getting ready to go to HARD Summer. 2 days later I would find out I was 5 weeks and 2 days pregnant with Katie.
I was only about 6 weeks pregnant when I’d first heard it. My boobs hurt, I was nauseous, I was hormonal, and I was coming to terms with an unplanned pregnancy. I remember telling someone I was having a hard time. “Ohhh… just wait. It gets so much harder.” “Um. Okay.”
“Ohhh… just wait. It gets so much harder.”
Then around 16 or 17 weeks, I bent over and realized it was starting to get difficult. When I brought it up, I heard it again. “Ohhh… just wait. You’re going to get SOOOO much bigger and it gets SOOOOO much harder.”
Then in the last couple weeks in my pregnancy, when I was sure my struggles of being so big and uncomfortable would be validated, I heard about how much harder it would be once the baby arrived. If I thought my insomnia was bad now, “Wait until the baby comes and you’re REALLY getting no sleep.”
How we spent most of our time in the colic days
Okay, so now the baby is here. She has colic. I’ve never had such a hard time in my life. This is when it really started getting to me. “Katie has been crying for 14 hours straight with only one hours of napping. I can’t stop crying. I don’t know what to do.” “If you think THAT’S hard, wait until she’s teething/crawling/walking/talking combined and it gets sooo much harder!” You know what? Fuck you.
I thought I would be safe from all of this during my second pregnancy. I’ve been here before: I know what to expect. Instead I heard how much harder two would be than one. Like “not twice as hard, a million times harder.” Like I “couldn’t even imagine.”
Why are we doing this to each other?! Is it not possible that more than one situation in life can be difficult? t’s like hearing a friend complain of a cold and saying, “WELL I HAD PNEUMONIA LAST YEAR!”? Why are we bringing each other down like this? Pregnancy is hard, raising kids is hard. When one difficult phase ends, another begins. Just because something may be harder than something else, (which is subjective anyways), doesn’t mean that something else isn’t also difficult.
“It’s like hearing a friend complain of a cold and saying, ‘WELL I HAD PNEUMONIA LAST YEAR!'”
We need to stop one-upping each other like this. Being a new parent (or being on your way to becoming one) is a scary time. We need to be able to reach out to each other for support, not hear that our struggles are insignificant, nor how much “worse” they will become in the next phase.
And lastly, while some of these “it gets harder” statements may actually be true, albeit rude and unnecessary to point out, I stand by my opinion that colic was still harder than teething/crawling/walking/talking combined.
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