Let’s get into it! How do you get through pregnancy (with two babies) right when your career is starting to kick off, right when your marriage is really hitting its growth and stride, and right as you start to venture into the comfort that is your 30’s? I’m writing this a few year’s out now (thank you, pandemic), so most of this is just distant memory now, but I hope it helps you.
I rolled into my second trimester with very little fanfare. The morning sickness stopped. The tiredness quieted down. The things I couldn’t eat before suddenly didn’t bother me as much, and (perhaps the best moment) I was able to drink coffee again. Even my sex drive came back. Although I had to go to the doctor nearly every other week, which got to be a little overwhelming, my babies were growing, I was feeling good, I was hitting a stride again at work, and everything was feeling as “normal” as it possibly could.
One of the things that is fun about the second trimester is being able to tell your big news to your family and friends and maybe (if you’ve chosen to) find out gender! I had always had a feeling I was having at least one girl. I never connected to having a ‘boy’ and never picked out a name, so it caught me as almost no surprise that two little ladies were cooking in my ever-growing stomach.
I continued to work through my second trimester, balancing my busy lab work and being on my feet all day in steel toed shoes with my near constant need to use the bathroom. While I stopped ‘slipping’ as much as I felt I had in my first trimester, I felt as if I needed to compensate in the second and really pushed myself. The benefit of staying so busy was gaining very little weight. Nearly all of ‘me’ was baby, and it all came straight out in front of me. My husband still jokes you could barely tell I was pregnant from behind.
I got asked constantly what my plans were when I had the babies. “Will you leave your work behind?” “Become a stay at home mom?” “What about your PhD?” As someone who highly values her career, it was beyond infuriating. I had worked really hard to get where I was in my career, and I wasn’t about to give that up for a baby, let alone two. I took on extra projects to prove my devotion, dove head first into extra assignments, and stretched my limitations during a day. Don’t be me. I repeat…don’t be me.
At home second trimester is like a golden window, and maybe one of the last you get for quite some time. It’s when you’re picking names, paint colors, setting up a registry: all the fun ‘to-do’ list items that fit so well into my hyper Type A personality. I really enjoyed being able to cocoon myself in little projects.
It absolutely flew by…and then it was on to trimester 3…