The Pregnant Introvert

So, a few things have happened that have interfered with me posting to this blog as much as I would have liked to, one of which is that I am now about halfway through my first pregnancy.

Sometimes I forget I'm pregnant. It takes a second to realize that the "How are you feeling?" is different from the everyday "How are you?" I'm not used to people being so solicitous, as I give off that solitary vibe and am not used to being the center of attention. And people will notice me even more as the bump gets bigger. Luckily, no one but close friends and family have actually reached out and patted the belly yet. ;)

I'm noticing some of the same things that happened when I was planning my wedding. Now that I'm pregnant, women who I normally have little in common with feel more comfortable chatting with me. In my twenties, most women my age were driven to distraction by the care of small children while I was driven to distraction by studying and teaching. We were often too tired to really have anything to say to each other. But, in a world where everyone does their own thing and there are few rules and conventions anymore, it was a pleasant surprise, when I began planning my wedding, at age 31, that women of all ages were suddenly taking an interest in my china pattern. And as non-traditional as my life was (I lived alone and worked), compared to those of lots of women I knew, I wanted a super-traditional wedding. The idealist literary dreamer who figured for most of her life that she'd never get the opportunity to have a wedding was going to have the fairy-tale princess experience or be damned! In the process of orchestrating said experience, I found that the older ladies in the family who could never relate to the strange bookish creature before seemed genuinely interested in this facet of my personality. The same seems true with pregnancy. While I often crave alone-time, I don't like to be lonely, and it's nice to have people show interest.

While I've mostly been too nauseous to feel like a princess while pregnant, now that I'm halfway through and my life seems to be returning to a semblance of normalcy (I'm even getting my appetite back), I am going to try to make the most of all the cliches that as an academic I'm supposed to eschew. For example, in about a week, I am going to have the cutest gender-reveal cupcakes ever.