Sometimes in life things don’t go the way you planned. I like to tell myself that ‘maturity’ is accepting this fact and not letting it stop you. Every female has perceptions about how her first pregnancy would go, I was no exception, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that my fantasies and perceptions were going to be different from my reality.
I always thought the first thing I’d do would be to acquire an uber-chick pregnancy wardrobe from the maternity stores in the mall. Instead I found myself only buying what was needed- stretchy pants and sticking to increasing the sizes of regular looking clothes so that I was not quite ‘ flaunting my bump’. Most people at work later told me they didn’t realize that I was pregnant till about my 8th month, which was fine by me…
I thought I was going to gain tons of weight and almost as soon as I discovered I was pregnant I rushed out and ordered multiple prenatal videos ready to stay fit and minimize the weight gain. I ended up not using them, because with all that was going on I actually found myself losing weight, and combined with the fatigue and preterm contractions I ended up barely taking them out of their cases.
Other things were different, we had stopped telling people about the pregnancy so there was really no reason to sign up for a gift registry, the only baby showers were the ones at my work and my husband’s work place since most of the people we worked with knew about the pregnancy early. We ended up signing up for a small registry for family that asked us to, but still didn’t tell people about it.
Yet, despite all these differences, this pregnancy taught us that sometimes all that stuff isn’t important, what’s really important is the miracle of conception and what God plans to do and that's what we had to focus on. We focused not on buying color coordinated car seats and cribs and organizing a customized nursery, but on praying and waiting on God and believing Him for our child. Not knowing whether your child will survive the first days of his life, and realizing that if he does it would be still the beginning of a long road, really does change your perspective on life.
