Maternal Instinct: 14 Weeks and a Day
Editor's Note: We will be regularly following Cecile's journey as she becomes a first time mom to see what her experience is like after miscarriage. You'll find her posts on our blog once a month.
Words & Images by Cecile Davis
I’m feeling so fat, you guys. And this morning sickness is for real. Despite feeling like crap pretty much all day, all I want to do is EAT. I mean, like seriously eat. All the sour things… PICKLES, lemon, kale, mustard greens, and olives. Oh, and chocolate popsicles.
So, the morning, ahem, I mean all day sickness, was really cramping my style not to mention my now voracious eating habits. I started googling various natural cures, which all lead me to one road: ginger. Normally, I can’t get enough of the stuff but this baby is not a fan, (with the exception of ginger ale, thank god) and just the smell was making me heave. Google had some pretty scary answers when it came to prescription options, so I asked our mid-wife for a happy medium and she prescribed a combination of vitamin B and antihistamine. That, along with the Mama SeaBand has really done the trick. I replaced the “go to” ginger tea with peppermint and suddenly I had my life back!
So here’s a weird thing; people need to keep their opinions to themselves. I don’t mean when it comes to pregnancy tips or birth plan advice (although kinda with that too), I mean with obvious shit. If we have to hear one more time what a HUGE responsibility children are (isn’t there a saying about horses and barn doors?) and rude comments about our names choices... No we’re not trying to scar our child for life by giving them a unique name. Yes, we’ve thought this through, we’ve been discussing baby names for 3 years! I think it just plain rude to say you don’t like a name choice, if you don’t have anything nice to say…
My husband and I both have wonderfully unusual names and probably wouldn’t be the people we are today if we’d been named William and Mary. As for the responsibility piece, yeah DUH. Do you think we’re idiots?!?! Why do you think we’ve waited until now to do this? This baby was not an accident, we finally feel like we’re in a place in our lives where we can support and raise a child responsibly. I don’t feel overwhelmed by the idea of having and raising a child, I feel overwhelmed by opinions and the sinking feeling that my beliefs are wrong.
We’ve also received various reactions to discovering the gender, and as a professional photographer I’m feeling a bit of pressure to come up with some brilliant gender reveal that will blow up Pinterest. I must admit a bit of apathy when it comes to this, maybe it's because I do it for a living or maybe it's because I feel like I could never live up to the hype. The punk in me wants to turn my pregnancy “coverage” into some performance art piece, with the weirdest, most absurd photographs possible. As of right now, I just want to enjoy this journey and save the perfect Instagram maternity pictures for our second kid.
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Cecile is a photographer and filmmaker living on Maryland's rural Eastern Shore. She specializes in artistic and highly emotional wedding coverage. Her husband and two dogs are expecting the arrival of their first human baby in April 2017.
