a Special Multivitamin
Only take a multivitamin which is specifically designed for pregnancy. Certain vitamins are potentially harmful to the foetus if levels get too high, and the pregnancy multivits have just the right amount of everything. Bless those Top Scientists.
Some Good News
One of the best things about getting pregnant for the first time is that it shocks you into being more healthy almost overnight, and once you’ve learned some new habits, and have managed to give up the three vodka and tonics and a kebab on the way home from work, you might just hang on to them for the rest of your life. It may feel like a brutal change of diet and lifestyle to start with, but there are great benefits. There’s a good reason why pregnant ladies are said to ‘glow’ halfway through the pregnancy—anyone who pays as much careful attention to eating well and avoiding all toxins would glow after a couple of months! See your clean-up act as the best beauty routine ever, and it might not feel so hard. In fact, for many of you it won’t be hard at all, as your new body just doesn’t feel like ingesting tons of toxins every day. Anyway, you’ll be back on the double tall lattes before your baby can say ‘Mummy, are you sure you wouldn’t rather have an organic peppermint tea?’
Common Concerns of Future Yummy Mummies
This section is for you if you have ever worried about what it might be like to become a MOTHER (in other words, if you’re just like every woman I’ve ever met). Oh, how we ladies love to worry! The list of concerns and questions all future Yummy Mummies carry around in their heads is breathtaking, and it makes one fret for the future of the human race: will anything make all you potentially fantastic mothers take the plunge and actually procreate? Will any reassuring words overcome your dread of turning into a fat, boring Frumpy Mummy, who fails miserably at every aspect of baby care, and who never sees the inside of a fancy restaurant again?
I seem to spend half of my free time pacifying freaked-out childless friends who are terrified of committing to their perceived life of drudgery, lard and frumpiness. ‘Hang on!’ I cry. ‘Are you saying I’m lardy and frumpy? Did I know what I was doing before I started? Do I know now?’ No, no and no.
However, I have learned quite a few things about what it feels like to become a Yummy Mummy, and I’ll do my best to ease at least some of the stress. Where I fail, watching anything with Paul Bettany in it should relieve any furrowed brows.
Here are some of the most common worries my friends seem to have, and some mildly helpful advice:
I don’t feel very maternal—maybe I’ll be an awful mother
This is a disaster. You will never be a good mother, and you should book in for a hysterectomy immediately. You probably shouldn’t have pets either. Or houseplants.
I’m lying, of course: very few women feel very maternal before they have a baby, and most go on to become fantastic mums. (Many don’t even feel that maternal after the birth, but it’s not something people like to talk about. I like to talk about it a lot, and so I do in Part Five).
It’s not even clear what feeling ‘maternal’ means, anyway. In a similar way to how much libido a woman has, so women have varying degrees of maternal urges, and there’s nothing to say that you should be consumed with the desire to foster every child on the planet before having a baby yourself.
‘Feeling Maternal’ could mean any, or none, of the following:
Wherever you sit on this scale before you have a baby, you will almost certainly sit somewhere else afterwards, and not necessarily at the more maternal end. I didn’t feel the overwhelming urge to have babies before I became pregnant for the first time, and I was quite able to pass babies in the street without drooling. In fact, I was barely aware of their existence until I was at least five months pregnant, and that was mainly because I was checking out groovy pram models.
Happily, something inside my brain changed the moment I held my first baby, and I have been unable to hear a baby crying or see a child in distress since without being overcome with the compulsion to cheer the poor thing up. It’s just Yummy Mummy Nature doing her bit, and luckily it works for the majority of women. I’ve also had periods of feeling very un-maternal, for reasons I’m yet to understand, but these pass and I get back to being sickeningly in love with all three of mine very quickly.
Don’t worry if you don’t think you feel maternal enough: either you will become more maternal when your baby arrives, or you will remain as you are and do a perfectly good job of looking after your baby anyway. Worrying about it now is pointless: you just have to wait and see what happens, and stop telling yourself that you’re not kitted out to be a mother. If you’ve got a heart, a womb, some self-respect and a sense of humour then you’re good to go.
I don’t want to get fat
This seems to be one of the biggest off-putters for my child-free friends. I can’t believe how many pre-pregnant, gorgeous women freak out about this. Why should you get fat? If you’re not fat now, and if you care about how you look, and if you don’t want to become fat, then why should pregnancy make you fat? It’s a bit like saying: ‘I really want to go to Antigua this summer, but I’m worried I’ll get sunburn.’ Pack some sunblock then, stay in the shade and wear a wide-brimmed hat. Bingo—no sunburn!
Seriously, though, worrying about becoming fat during pregnancy is normal, because it happens to quite a lot of previously slimline ladies. But the news is very good: if you are careful about what you eat, if you continue to exercise and if you don’t treat pregnancy as an excuse to eat all the pies, then you will almost certainly not get fat. A little rounder-of-hip perhaps, but not fat. (See You’re Eating for How Many? in Part Three.)
What about the rest of my body? Won’t it be ruined?
No, it won’t. Lots of bits of your body will change, not necessarily for the better, but with a lot of effort most of this is perfectly fixable. If you are really worried about what will happen to your lovely body when you become a Yummy Mummy, then here are some honest truths: