Parenting Excerpts
Volume 1, Number 5

The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy
(Or everything your doctor won’t tell you)

By Vicki Iovine

The following excerpt was reprinted with permission from Pocket Books.

Why I Wrote This Book
I have given birth to four children in six years, two boys and two girls with no twins in the lot, and the lesson I learned (aside from not to trust the rhythm method) is this: 90% of the information I needed to get me through these pregnancies came from my Girlfriends who had already had children. Sure, there are a lot of books about pregnancy that you can read. Good student (and terrified person) that I was, I bought them all and read most of them….In fact, I now know so much about the technical aspects of this pregnancy business that I am certain that I could deliver your baby, even by cesarean section, with nothing but newspaper to wrap it in, on the floor of a speeding taxi….

But the experience of pregnancy is so much more than medical; it is emotional, physical and social, and I never found a book in seven years of searching, that addressed those aspects of the experience in the way a good, experienced and…candid…Girlfriend could. None of these books ever really seemed to capture the essence of my pregnancies. They were too detached, too calm, too neat, too moderate for what I was experiencing. To me, pregnancy is an alarming, charming, sloppy and sentimental affair….”Sensitive” or “moody” are really lame descriptions of a pregnant woman’s emotional life, trust me! When a book told me that I would have a discharge for a few weeks after delivery, I was in no way prepared for the fact that I was unable to go four feet from my hospital bed to the bathroom without leaving a grisly trail that looked like a murder had taken place. No, it was not my beloved doctor or the traditional pregnancy books that prepared me, but rather my Girlfriends….It was also my Girlfriends who reassured me that my husband would still make a good father even if he fainted during ultrasounds and refused to cut the umbilical cord. It was my Girlfriends who told me which outfits made my behind look even fatter than it was or if I was acting unbearably premenstrual….

The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy is the book I always hoped to find when I was pregnant. It is the compilation of the experiences, opinions, concerns, complaints and remedies that my Girlfriends and I had when we were pregnant. If any real medical information is passed along in this book, it is largely accidental, for I leave that domain to the doctors. Desperate as you may be at this point in your life for someone to tell you what to do, I would feel a whole lot better if you would run any of my suggestions by your doctor before adopting them….You should feel free to disregard or disagree with any part of this book. For example, if you are one of the blessed ones who never experience one single gag of nausea during the nine months of your pregnancy, go ahead and ignore the parts that deal with morning sickness. Just don’t talk too much about your good fortune. A safe rule of thumb is: BE CAREFUL NOT TO GET SMUG BECAUSE THE GODS OF PREGNANCY ARE USUALLY FAIR. In other words, if you don’t get morning sickness, you will probably be cursed with uncontrollable gas.

We have all heard of women who do pregnancy perfectly. You know the type: a model or a soap opera star who is reverently portrayed in women’s magazines with bouncing hair and maternity clothes that actually match. Or worse, she is the daughter of your mother’s best friend so you have to hear about and be compared with her every single day. She gains the recommended 20 to 25 pounds, her skin stays clear and rosy, she prepares for birth by listening to meditation tapes, she plays singles tennis up until she is six centimeters dilated and she swears she has never felt better in her life. She also has a husband who thinks his wife is at her most beautiful when swollen with his child, who actually asks questions at the childbirth preparedness classes, and who, after the baby is born, takes the placenta home and buries it beneath an old oak tree.

This Book Is Not for These Women

It is for the rest of us: those of us who put on 20 pounds between the home pregnancy test and the first doctor’s visit. It is for those of us who get our first case of acne since the Homecoming Dance. It is for those of us who have hemorrhoids so bad that we have considered never eating solid food again….It is for those of us who have considered murdering our husbands in their sleep because we thought we heard them say ‘moo’ when we were getting dressed. It is for those of us who can no longer watch a Pampers commercial without being moved to tears and who feel it is our responsibility to memorize the faces of children on milk cartons so that we can reunite them with their bereft parents.

In other words, this book is for every pregnant woman, because I believe that any woman who tells you that her pregnancy is, without exception, the most pleasant and fulfilling time of her life is either lying or has a personality disorder. Besides, I’ll bet good money that during their pregnancies, even some of those models and soap opera stars got hemorrhoids.

You can buy this book on Babynut here:

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