Let me just state for the record: being pregnant and having a toddler is hard.

More like HARD.
More like I-am-not-sure-how-I-am-still-alive-right-now-HARD.

And I know I am not alone in this sentiment. There have been many mothers before me and will be many after who lovingly and graciously endure this season of life. They drag themselves out of pregnant-comasleep to the sounds of am 18 month old ripping off her diaper and smearing its contents all over her crib at 2am. They look in the mirror and laughed as they carry a 20 month old in one arm, her babydoll collection in the other arm, and a fetus underneath it all. They keep their cool when forced to crawl on all fours like a beached manatee in the snack aisle in Target because the child on the outside decided it would be fun to grab an entire box of goldfish off the shelf and dump it on the floor. They grit their teeth and smile when woman after woman (usually in a Crimson Tide Sweatshirt, usually in Walmart) makes fun comments like “You’re gonna have your hands full, ain’t cha?” and “Lord, honey, you look like you’re about to pop. The other one’s not yours, is it?”

Yes, I know I am not alone in this. And that helps. But it doesn’t make the day to day operations of caring for a baby on the outside, a baby on the inside, (ha) yourself, and (ha ha) your husband any easier. I imagine pregnancy with any additional kid is hard, but pregnancy with a toddler seems like it may be the hardest. I have experienced levels of physical and emotional exhaustion that I thought were only possible in military survival training scenarios. Here are a few of them:

1. First Trimester Pukey Poop-Out

For me, the first trimester is always the hardest part of the pregnancy. My first trimester with this pregnancy was really hard because it was in the dead of the hottest summer ever conceived. Eloise had learned to walk just before I found out I was pregnant, so there were times when she would pull things off of a shelf or fall and bump her head, but she was still her sweet baby self. I, however, was teetering between narcolepsy and what felt like food poisoning all day, sprinkled with a bout of ravenous buffet-style hunger. I basically spent the bulk of summer of 2011 in one of two places- either lobotomized on the couch in a pool of my own sweat, or with my head resting gently in the freezer as I ate an entire carton of Ben and Jerry’s and my child teetered around the kitchen pulling knives off the shelf. The Pukey Poop-Out was more of an internal struggle. All I wanted to do was to take a nap in an ice bucket, but I had to trudge on. Mind over matter.

2. Second Trimester Wind

As soon as the first trimester sickness faded, I instantly felt like Wonder-Woman. I no longer wanted to puke and/or eat a huge plate of waffles and brussel sprouts. My energy levels were higher. This euphoric feeling lasted about six days. By then, the heat had subsided a little (like the high was 95 degrees instead of 110 ((seriously))) and I was able to go outside with my little one. I didn’t look or really feel pregnant for those six days, so we had a grand time going for walks or to the splash pad or the park. After living like a person on Hoarders for three months, I cooked, cleaned, organized, exercised, prioritized, and got excited about another baby on the way. I was pregnancy Barbie. Six days later…

3. Oops I (over)Did It Again

My initial burst of energy faded and I became more sluggish. I started having to get up in the night to pee a lot. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. So I spent a lot of time using Pinterest in the middle of the night, and started to feel emotionally overwhelmed that I would never be able to have that beautiful backyard potting shed that I had pinned, or that Eloise’s first birthday party really sucked compared to the Pinterest birthday parties, or that I will never have the funds, the body,  or the occasion to wear the beautiful dress I saw. So during the time when I should have been feeling the best, I was sleep deprived because I was lamenting the fact that there is no where in Florence to get Prosciutto to make the Prosciutto-wrapped asparagus puffs that I had just pinned on to my “Nom Nom Nom” board. Lame.

During all of this, Eloise started Early Arts twice a week and went through her initiation into school by getting every common sickness available. So if I did manage to sleep for two hours without waking up to pee, Eloise would wake me up because she puked in her bed, or had a fever, or coughed up a lung. I began to stumble around and stopped forming complete sentences (which is what happens when I don’t sleep).

4. The Outsiders

Towards the end of my second trimester was when other people began to notice my pregnancy, or at least feel comfortable enough at that point to ask me about it. It made leaving the house more challenging, and not just because I stumbled around like a crack head. I am not sure if it is because I live in a really small town in the South, or if this is universal, but I am still amazed at the audacity of strangers to make comments on your situation like they 1) know you or 2) have any idea what they are talking about. So there I was, tired and slurring and stumbling through the pasta aisle at Walmart, just trying to find the one brand of linguine that is 100% whole grain while trying to force-feed Eloise a box of snacks to avoid a meltdown and here she comes: houndstooth purse, rhinestones on her plumped back pockets, rings on every finger, talking on her cell phone about “Mama’s ingrown toenail” and she stops. First I scooted over because I thought she was looking for pasta too, but she put her phone down and said, “Oh honey!”. It took me a minute to figure out she was even talking to me but I heard whoever was on the line say “Hell-oh? You they-er?” because she had the phone on speaker.

Then she said, “Is it a boy or a girl?”
(I thought she meant Eloise, who was wearing pink and had pigtails)
“A girl.”
“Oh two girls! Aint chew lucky?! I always wanted girls but I had boys instead.” I then realized that she was referring to my pregnancy but I was too tired to care if she knew that my unborn child was a boy. “You’re gonna have your hands full! I hope you are sleeping now because believe me, you aren’t going to sleep more than a few hours a niiight from here on”.

She nodded to punctuate the end of her wisdom and picked up the phone again and walked off. It was then that I noticed she had a live Yorkie perched in her houndstooth purse, next to her pack of Virginia Slims. She didn’t even care if I responded or not. Her job was done. I looked at Eloise and she laughed and threw a cheddar bunny on the floor. All I wanted to do was crawl into the shopping cart and take a nap. Instead, I was getting unsolicited words of wisdom from people of Walmart.

If this was an isolated incident, then it would have been funny. But literally every time I leave the house, people feel the need to make comments on how full my hands are going to be or how tired I am going to be as if I wasn’t already exhausted. I know the right thing to do is to smile and nod and move on, but when you are already very tired, it is very hard to be polite. It’s extra hard to fight the urge to yell, “LADY I DON’T GIVE A S— ABOUT YOUR MAMA’S INGROWN TOENAIL! IT’S NONE OF MY BUSINESS AND MY LIFE IS NONE OF YOURS!”  It’s another emotional struggle, brought on by a physical struggle.

5. The Third and Final Frontier

The third trimester is a combination of all of the previous stages of personal discomfort. I don’t sleep very well, I am hot and sweaty and stinky (even though it is the dead of winter), people make all kinds of crazy comments any time I leave the house, and you can still find me with my head resting in the freezer while I down a carton of Ben and Jerry’s. But to the previous physical discomfort, I can add the excitement of carrying around a basketball under my shirt. I am not a graceful person even when I’m not pregnant. So when you add the fact that I waddle instead of walk, grunt to squat, can’t put my pants or socks on by myself anymore, and sometimes get into positions that I cannot get out of without assistance (like sitting, or laying down, or anything low) it makes the situation that much worse. Not to mention the fact that my body weighs a lot more that it usually does, so my muscles are not trained in lifting such a heavy load. Simple tasks like bending to clean the bathtub (not that I do it that often) involve grunting, panting, and sweating. That is what my body is doing.

Then there is the whole separate issue that there is a fully viable human being living inside me. He gets his energy, nutrients, and entertainment from me. This is cool when you think theoretically about it, but the literal meaning is that he is basically a 7 pound parasite living in my abdomen. He sucks what little life-juice I have left after stumbling, stuttering, waddling and grunting all day. When he gets bored (and he does often), he plays a little kickball with my diaphragm, or uses my spleen as a punching bag. No big deal. Glad I could be of service.

And then there’s Big Wheeze.

She is currently 21 months old. Her brother will be born any day now. And like a perfectly timed Hollywood stunt explosion, she entered the early terrible twos just as I entered my third trimester. So here I am, stumbling, stuttering, waddling and grunting on my own accord, and I suddenly have this child I have to discipline for the first time. She doesn’t want to sit in her seat. It’s dinner time. She needs to sit in her seat and eat her dinner. She stands up in her seat. I tell her to sit. She cries “NO!” and throws spaghetti on the floor. I gently tell her that she is not allowed to throw her food when she is frustrated, and I still need her to sit on her bottom. I tell her if she doesn’t sit on her bottom I will have to spank her and I don’t want to. I try to physically make her sit. She sits, but cries and smears her dinner all over the table. I cry on the inside, and imagine I am on a beach with a fruity drink in my hand. I snap back to reality, only to find two dogs sitting on the table eating the smeared spaghetti and Eloise down from the table playing with some matches she must have found on the floor.

Now I have a decision to make: do I waddle over to her, grunt and lift her squirming and spaghettified body, and  and try to make her sit at the table, because I know that is the right thing to do? Or do I go back to the mental beach with my fruity beverage and imaginary toned bikini body and let the dogs eat off of the table and my kid play with matches?

Sometimes this is the hardest decision I have to make all day. I wish I could say I pick the first choice every time because it is the right thing to do and doing the right thing is more important to me than feeling rested. But that would be a straight-up lie. I’m tired. And the more tired I am, the more justifications I have to just “let this one slide”. Then I go into a mental debate with myself about the pros and cons of just “letting this one slide” and usually end with feeling guilty about how my daughter is going to end up 16 and in juvie because I wasn’t a consistent role model of discipline. By that time, the dogs have cleaned off all the food on the table and Eloise has lit something on fire. The decision has been made for me, since there is no longer any spaghetti to fight about. So I quickly waddle over to her and scoop her up, putting out the fire and getting a kick in the rib cage from little man, just in case I forgot about him. That does it- I decide to put on an Elmo video and let her eat cheese for dinner. I’m too tired to fight the inside (myself) (the baby) and the outside (Eloise) at once. All I want is a glass of wine and a nap, but neither of those seem like viable options in my near future.

Now please don’t read all of this and feel sorry for me. This, although it may sound like whining, is not whining. This is all a funny joke. It’s funny because I am only one in a great multitude of wonderful mothers who have waddled the path of more-than-one-baby-at-a-time fatigue. I am going to have easy days and hard days. All moms do. People are going to offer unsolicited advice to us in the pasta aisle. Children are going to need discipline when we don’t want to give it. We will all, at some point, mentally debate long enough about the pros and cons of buckling down and doing the right thing that the wrong thing will just go ahead and happen while we weren’t looking. We can either cry about our situation or laugh about it. I am going to choose to laugh (most of the time).

And as my next baby is going to be born any day now, I know that I am in for even more hard work. I don’t want to admit it, but Ms. Virgina Bama-Slim-Yorkie was right. I am not going to sleep very much in the upcoming months. And my hands will be full. But that is not always a bad thing. It is a hard thing, yes, but not bad. It just a stage of life like all of the others.

So in the first few weeks of Milam James Bethea’s (our baby boy- pronounced “My-lum”) life I will learn a new kind of hard. And as Eloise continues to become her own little person, I will learn a different kind of hard. It will be trying but good. So-and-so if you happen to see me in Walmart and I have two babies in the cart and I am staring off into space, don’t tell me my hands are full. I already know that. Ask me how my fruity beverage is…