Southern Gentleman (Charleston Heat 3)

I feel a swell of—of I don’t know what as the women around me introduce themselves. They talk about a lot of the things I’ve been feeling. The exhaustion, the strangeness of the whole experience.

But more than that, I notice how they talk about it all like it’s perfectly normal. Perfectly normal to be pregnant, and perfectly normal to be in love with it or not. The introductions run the gamut from a black woman named Hallie who’s had trouble sleeping to a tall woman with blue hair named Fiona, smiling as she tells us this is her fourth baby and that she’d do it all over again because she loves giving birth so much.

Relief.

That’s what I feel. A huge, overwhelming sense of relief.

I’m not alone. And I’m not making a mistake by having a baby, and I’m not any less of a woman or a mother for having the feelings I do.

“I’m Julia,” I say when it’s my turn. “I’m just shy of nine weeks. This is my first baby, and we don’t know the gender yet.” We. Me and Greyson. Sounds weird to say that. Weird and wonderful, too. “I’m feeling…all right. To be honest, the first trimester has been rough.”

The room erupts in sympathetic murmurs.

“Mine sucked,” Hallie says, nodding. “I felt sick the whole time. Not throwing up sick. Just awful sick.”

“Same here. That first trimester is all about getting through. Trust me when I say it gets better,” another woman adds as she cradles her cantaloupe-sized bump.

I feel like the room is wrapping me in a big old hug.

“Thanks.” I swallow. “I’m starting to see glimmers of the light. I’ve been having some low back pain—I sit a lot at work—but otherwise, just fighting some residual nausea.”

“We’ll be addressing that low back pain a lot throughout class,” Katie says. “It’s a very common problem throughout pregnancy.”

We move through a series of slow, deep poses that feel fucking amazing. I haven’t felt well enough to really exercise all that much, save for a long-ish walk here and there. But it’s nice to feel my body blinking awake. Stretching long-neglected muscles. Using my arms and my legs to just move through the flow, breathing deeply as I go.

I suck at almost everything. I have to glance at my neighbors to see what Katie means by cat and cow poses, and I can barely hold downward dog—a “resting pose”—for more than four seconds before my legs start to shake.

But no one seems to give a fuck. Most of us are tired, and slow, and we have aches in places we never knew existed. This isn’t about perfecting poses, or breaking a sweat (although I am definitely getting clammy.)

It’s about being kind to ourselves and our bodies. Acknowledging the hard work they’re doing while we attempt to go about life as usual.

I know I keep saying this, but I feel it here more than ever—I feel like myself as I jump rope my hips, stretch them out in something called pigeon pose. Totally present. Not wanting to fast forward because I want to die. Not wanting to rewind to remember my parents, or the life I had before I got pregnant.

I just move between Lauren, 36 weeks, on my left, and Jordan, 22 weeks, on my right.

Jordan knocks her water bottle over in the middle of class, spilling it all over her mat. I hand her my towel and she thanks me, smiling. Not long after, when we’re stretching our elbows away from each other by reaching down our backs, Jordan hands me her strap when I can’t make my fingers touch.

It’s a simple gesture. Small. But it fills me with this sense of warmth—faith and gratitude, too.

Faith that I’m going to be all right.

Gratitude that I’m not in this alone.

As I move, I can’t help but think that my body feels tender and strange. Mine, but not.

Just like my mind.

Letting my thoughts continue to wander as I breathe in and out through my nose, I think about how pregnancy is constantly giving me all the feels. Bad ones. Good ones. It’s emotional and sensory overload.

It’s life, turned all the way up.

And just like most things in life, it’s not all good, and it’s not all bad, either. The experience falls somewhere in between. The grey where black and white overlap.

A lot of narratives about pregnancy and motherhood would have us think otherwise—that it’s pure magic, that it’s happiness and butterflies, that it’s all good, all the time.

Without knowing it, I felt like shit about myself because that’s not how my experience has been so far. It’s been a struggle.

Being in this room has shown me that I am not alone in that struggle.

And I think that is magic.

By the time class is over and we’re cooling off in shavasana, or dead man’s pose, I’m kicking myself for not coming to a prenatal class sooner. This was awesome. And much needed.