Liz Fraser - The Yummy Mummy’s Survival Guide

You might get light-headed easily.

It gets harder to pull your abdomen in successfully and pretend you have a washboard stomach: it’s like having permanently bad premenstrual fluid retention, except this time it doesn’t go away—it just gets worse.

You have trouble sleeping, despite being exhausted.

You start having very complicated, frantic dreams, in which you already have a baby but you keep doing all sorts of dreadful things to it, such as dropping it off the top floor of Selfridges, leaving it at a bus stop, forgetting you put it in the bath while you went out for a meal, only to find…well, it’s not pretty, but it’s just a normal reaction to your huge news.

You might start to feel sick, or even be sick (see Morning Sicknessbelow).

Morning Sickness:If Only it Were That Simple…

What a misnomer! Firstly, as millions of women every year discover, it does not only occur in the morning, and secondly, it does not always involve being sick. The (presumably male) genius who came up with the term ‘morning sickness’ should have spent a month or two in our house during the first trimester of my pregnancies, and then maybe we’d have had something more realistic to work with: 24-Hour Nausea, Early Evening Retch, or Twelve-Week Hell, for example.

From what I’ve read, this ‘feeling really sick’, which you are very likely to experience to some degree in the first few months, seems to have something to do with hormones, as usual, and the reasons it seems worse in the morning are, apparently:

The levels of these wretched hormones are higher in the morning.

Your stomach is empty, so you feel sicker.

It’s Nature’s clever way of saying ‘Put that third pain au chocolat down! You’re about to start expanding wildly, so just suck on a lemon drop instead.’

I suffered from evening sickness, which confounds all these theories. I was fine all day until about three or four in the afternoon, and from then on it was just a case of surviving until my husband came back from work (he had to negotiate shorter hours just to get me through those weeks). I would immediately collapse into bed and try to fall asleep, just so that I could forget how awful I was feeling. Oh, happy days.

The other misleading thing about ‘morning sickness’ is that it sounds as though you are actually going to be sick. If only. In fact, one of the things I found hardest to bear was that I wasn’t sick. Ever. I always felt that if I could only be sick, I would somehow feel relieved and better, but I never was. It was just hour after hour of feeling sick, like terrible sea-sickness, except that, being pregnant, I didn’t want to take any anti-sickness tablets, because of the potential health risks. I even made myself sick a couple of times, just to get some relief, and although I did feel better for a while afterwards, it wasn’t for long and it’s probably not a very good idea.

Common Concerns

I’m just being pathetic

No you’re not. Feeling nauseous and being sick for week after week is physically and mentally crippling, and for many of my friends it was the worst part of the whole pregnancy. For some it was even worse than the actual birth part, so don’t ever kid yourself that you should just pull your socks up and stop being such a whinger: you’re pregnant, so whinge away! Anyone who hasn’t eaten properly for six weeks, feels as though they are on the high seas with Ellen MacArthur, and is trying to come to terms with the mind-blowing fact that there’s a human being growing inside her is entitled, and absolutely bound , to feel well below par and to want some sympathy. Morning sickness is not just a mildly unpleasant inconvenience—it can be almost unbearable, so give yourself a break and spend some extra time trying to look after yourself.

I’m not eating enough because I feel so sick. Is it bad for the baby?

Miraculously, if you are managing to eat and drink anything at all, your baby will carry on as if nothing is wrong. That’s where your reserves come in handy: the baby takes all the nutrients it needs from what you have stored up over the last few years, and it can survive very well off those while you walk around like a nauseous zombie for a few months. But if you can’t keep any food or liquid down then you must get medical help. There is a condition called Hyperemesis Gravidarum which causes this sort of complete food rejection, and you can get more information at www.hyperemesis.org. A small number of women end up in hospital for a while if the sickness gets really bad, so keep an eye on things.

So what can I do to make it better?

Short of spending a night (or several) with Gael Garcia Bernal or receiving a lifetime’s supply of Crème de la Mer products, I really have no idea, because there are as many supposed remedies for the condition as there are positions for getting yourself knocked up in the first place. As that is so obviously not the answer you were after, here are some suggestions from myYummy Mummy friends which are all supposed to help:

Eat more ginger—crystallised, or in tea or capsules—or slowly nibble ginger biscuits.

Eat small amounts regularly, so your stomach never becomes empty.

Sip water frequently.

Get more sleep and rest.

Cut out coffee and alcohol.

Only turn left, except on Wednesdays when there is a full moon (no, not that one).

Smell fresh mint.

Get as much fresh air as possible.

Press your pressure points: 11/2 inches from your wrist on the underneath of your forearm, in the centre. Try it—it just might work!

Take extra vitamin B6, or eat more nuts, bananas, avocados and whole grains, which contain it.

Try yeasty foods, such as Marmite, bagels, dry fruits and beer (sparingly!).

Eat more iron-rich foods, such as beef, sardines, eggs and leafy greens.

I tried all of these to almost no avail. The things which made me feel a little better were brushing my teeth about fifteen times a day, smelling fresh coffee and drinking diet lemonade.

Sonia, mother of Freya, two, and Louis, eight months

It sounds mad, but I had to drink a can of ice-cold Coke the minute I woke up, and I was absolutely fine all day after that. After about eight weeks all the symptoms disappeared, but I still have my morning fix!