It’s now ten weeks down and thirty to go and I have been noticing lately the expectations people have had already this early on, and my inability to live up to those expectations.

In the past, and to an extent now, I have always cared about what other people thought of me and their expectations of what I was doing and how I was going to achieve the things I wanted to achieve. I took my own wants and needs into consideration very little and always tried to live up to other expectations.

Ben has always tried to get me out of this habit, to stop thinking about everyone else once in a while and think about myself. I have always found this incredibly difficult, not only to apply but even to understand why I should try to change…until now.

Heading into week eleven I still have not suffered from morning sickness and have been told by my GP that if it hasn’t hit now then chances are good that I am one of the lucky 25% of women who simply don’t get morning sickness. 25%!!! That can’t be right? I had always thought and most people I have told that to have reiterated the idea that pregnancy and morning sickness were just two things that always went together. In fact some women who have had children and have heard that got quite upset and to a point, angry at me for not suffering the way they did.

I started to get a little upset by that. I felt like I was missing out, that I wasn’t getting the full pregnancy experience. That if I didn’t suffer for the baby then I wasn’t as good a mother as these women who had. Then that little part of my brain clicked in and went “Wait a minute! You want to be uncomfortable and vomiting not to satisfy your own wants and needs but to make these women feel better? How the hell does that work?”

Why was I always so content to live up to other people’s expectations instead of my own even if they made me feel uncomfortable? Why didn’t I stop for two seconds and think about what was actually good for me? Why was it always so hard for that little part of my brain to click in before and see the importance of looking after myself first?

I guess in a way it was difficult to see the difference between what I wanted and what other people wanted, but when someone wants you to throw up every morning and be uncomfortable just to make themselves feel better about you being pregnant it is time for the reality chip to start working and tell them to bugger off.

Image by welshwitch36 (Flickr).