to be fed up with some pregnant women collapsing into a heap of uselessness?

[ILIketoMarmiteMarmite]

OK this is not going to go down well BUT I wish some pregnant women would not act as if they were Jane Austen women lying on chaise longues with the blinds drawn (and MN open) waiting for their confinement.

On a thread yesterday or the day before there was a mention of respect for women who give birth and so on, and as a mother myself (and heavily pregnant again now) I appreciate what a big deal giving birth is, and what a big deal raising children is. But pregnancy is not an illness. You can still mow the grass, get the required amount or more done at work, act in a reasonable manner, carry your shopping etc etc. Women who are strong and healthy should not turn into delicate little flowers who cannot be disturbed or asked to do anything in case they are upset. Nor is pregnancy a get out of jail free card for being a horror to your dh or dp.

I think I am annoyed by woman at work who has nothing wrong with her (as she delightedly reported over coffee) but takes at least one sick day a week off work because she finds it hard to get out of bed!! She's also always moaning that her dh doesn't do everything for her.

OK now come to think of it I can't actually think of any Jane Austen women who were preg. And I DO realise that some people have difficult pregnancies, but most don't.

OK maybe IABU but hey, indulge me cos I'm pregnant!

I think YABU.
With my first pregnancy I was determined to that pregnancy wasn't an illness and that i would continue going to the gym every morning as I had done previously. At about 9 weeks however, following a furniture moving incident I had a bleed and wound up having a scan to see if everything was ok.
Thankfully everything was fine but I realised that the baby came first, not me and that I should rest and let my DH help me. It was infuriating sometimes feeling so helpless but had to be done.

Then when i was pregnant with DS2. Although it was a fairly ok pregnancy. I was much happier to let DH carry the shopping, move house while i lounged around doing easy stuff or nothing at all. Now this was a healthy pregnancy so to outsiders I may have looked like a right princess lazy-arse. But i don't regret it because I had no bleeding and no stress.

I don't think YABU. I see what you're saying even if a lot of posters don't!

Women who are enjoying normal healthy pregancies (ie not suffering with hyperemesis, SPD, placenta praevia etc) have no need to act like total wet lettuces when pregnant. I KNOW you get tired, feel totally crappy and can hardly drag yourself up to bed at the end of the day but that's normal. I will make allowances for a pregnant woman who is completely knackered and feeling like she is being attacked by aliens from the inside out. Of course she deserves to have someone make her a cup of tea and do the hoovering.

What I find really irritating is those women who, for 8 months on from the minute they see that blue line, seem to lose all the power of their limbs and brain and become completely feeble. They are the minority but they exist - I have worked with a few! I worked with one woman who told me she couldn't make the tea (it was her turn) because she wasn't allowed to lift anything as she was pregnant. I mean get a grip! You can put the bloody kettle on.

You ABU. Pregnancies are individual to each woman. I had SPD from month 4 and felt appalling for the first 14 weeks. I feel infintely better NOT being pregnant. However, there's no need, I agree, to be pathetic about lifting small objects etc - unless you've been told not to, which can happen.

I think YAB a bit U because you don't really know how she is feeling. With dd I had awful awful morning sickness and puked constantly for 20 weeks. Once that passed I thought I felt fine and would say so to anyone who asked but it is only looking back that I realise that I actually didn't feel fine-feeling so tired and heavy that you can barely summon the energy to get up to go for a wee is not fine in the normal scheme of things!
Even with the sickness I didn't tell people just how bad it was-just that I was feeling sick, it was only when I collapsed with dehydration that anyone (even my obstetrician) realised how ill I was.

With ds I had much less sickness than with dd and didn't get such a heavy feeling so again, told everyone how well I was feeling, but in reality some days I didn't manage to do much more than get dd up, give her her meals and change her nappy every few hours-it wasn't laziness, I physically couldn't do anything else. You might be able to get up and work through the tired feeling, but never forget that other people experience things differently so what for you might be slight discomfort could be agony for someone else.

That said, people really shouldn't take the piss and if they feel fine and well they shouldn't pretend otherwise and get other people to wait on them!

i have to say i did indulge myself pg ate for scotland (constant hungry) and did not put myself out for difficult Ax or stressful duty..and even had a few lie ins when unwell

as stress can adveresely affect you and the baby -mentally and physically

so yes i had my wee precious flower moments

and if i had a pg colleague i would not mind them doing same actually

I think YABU. OK, pregnancy isn't an illness, but it is a significant bodily task that can affect different women differently.

I've had one easy pregnancy, and I sailed through it. Of my other three full-term pregnancies (1st, 3rd and 4th), two were fraught with actual illness, and one was just very physically draining - I was exhausted. there was nothing wrong with me, but it did affect me differently.

If I had a friend who was blessed enough to be having an easy time of it, and told me I should pull myself together, we'd have sharp words. Or I might just crumple in a corner and sob my heart out.

I had the misfortune to know a very nasty girl a few years ago - she always told us that her mother was a midwife..

However the fact that was a great big fib was made clear to me when her boyfriend told me that she hadn't emptied the dishwasher since she discovered she was pregnant as "she couldn;t bend down"...

Having had a nurse for a mother, I knew there was no way that the offspring of a midwife would be allowed to be that pathetic in prgnancy.

(Nothing wrong with her throughout her pregnancy - she worked until week 34...)

DH thought I was being pathetic and precious-flowery when I crawled home, defeated, from the gym having thrown up there (having thrown up three times before leaving home) and fell asleep on the settee for two hours. I was about 10 weeks gone at the time and flu-ey, on top of the usual progeterone poisoning (a.k.a morning sickness) and exhaustion. I was just expected not to be useless. - By me and everone else. It was a bit of a shock to be grounded by the midwife for a week much much later on as I had been having contractions for a few days (20 odd weeks). I hated having to tell work I could not come in. Hated "allowing" my pregnancy to get in the way. I do, of course, know many women who had a really tough time of it and I certainly would not judge them for having to make allowances. But was always of the view that I just had to get on with things - even before pregnancy I never took time off work sick and I never wanted to feel like I was "skiving". That's not a judgement on others - just an observation that some of us find it hard to let ourselves slow down even if we want to. I really looked forward to being able to give up sit-ups at the gym - but I ended up doing other stuff anyway - felt obliged.

So, YANBU. I would have thought, "Not fair, I want to be a wimp too!". (Again NOT about people who are really suffering. Just 'normal' crapness of pregnancy.)

It is difficult to know how people are finding things. I've had a reasonably easy pregnancy so far (for which I'm grateful) but there have been a couple of really awful points - mostly when we were moving house and had one of the worst fortnights I've ever had, it was really grim. And yet, when people asked me how I was doing I still grinned like a loon and said 'Oh fine, I feel great'. Which probably made them a bit pissed off when I then took a sick day because I desperately needed a break. So, it might be that some people look like they're being a bit precious when they are actually having a really hard time of it (and won't admit it). Even my sister, who I'm very close to, was really shocked when I finally burst into tears in front of her.

I think I am going to have this problem but in reverse when/if I get pregnant. I use kick stools a lot and will carry on doing so while I'm still small enough. However I know that my work mate is one of these people who won't let me do those things and it's going to drive me insane.

Actually I think there's nothing wrong with having nine months of a bit of self-indulgence! I had a very easy pg and went around life totally as normal but I wish now that I had finished work much earlier and taken things much easier because frankly having a baby is tough work and I could have done with some Jane Austen type lounging around before DS arrived...

But YANBU. Some women do take the mickey. But ultimately I don't resent them a few months of being a bit rubbish.

I would rank myself with the posters who are pointing out that it is hard to know who is really suffering. I looked fine, and I mostly felt fine, despite dangerously high blood pressure. Even when I had pre-eclampsia, I still looked more or less all right. You can get quite ill, before it shows.

Now my point is that there was a lot of information that I was not sharing with my colleagues at this stage. If anyone asked how I was feeling, I would answer (quite truthfully) 'fine'.

Maybe hormones, maybe an unwillingness to admit to myself that things weren't going well. I had read so much about how pregnancy is not an illness and how a good mother-to-be with a healthy attitude will function normally, it was quite hard to admit to myself that my body doesn't seem to cope well with pregnancy.

For me it was a relief to be taken into hospital. Spent a lot of my second pregnancy in hospital too, and it made life a lot easier.

I would tend to give anyone the benefit of doubt. Particularly, since the outcome of that first pre-eclamptic birth was a dd with an invisible disability- and if I had a pound for every time someone has said of her 'but she looks perfectly ok, there can't be anything wrong with her', I could retire to a nice Tuscan villa.

How the f*ck do you know how the pg is affecting the woman in work??

good grief.

might be this

might be that

might be t'other

yeah the moon might be made of wendsydale Gromit.

as a general conversation

pregnant women sometimes use their pregancy as an excuse becuase they can't be fucked

others are like russian field workers giving birth to triplets and still digging up potatos so the proletariat can eat.

the OP comments that the former piss her right off

what the shit is up with that?

I had triplets but I can definately say that I was not digging potatoes at the same time

Although my MIL did tell me to stop moaning as woman in other countries just squat behind a bush then carry on with their days work

Hmm, pregnancy not an illness?

Well what about feeling like you have a 24hr hangover for 3 months (if you weren't pg and felt that ill you wouldn't be expected to go into work - yet I did it every fricking day), a painful hip joint that means walking is pain, which got so bad a got stuck in a bath in a hotel on my own and nearly had to call a work colleague to rescue me naked (it was my sheer embarrassment that made me power though the pain), getting a stinky cold that you can't take anything for.

...Incredible anxiety over impending motherhood, plus the fear of having hormones all over the place not to mention a mental health so fragile you make Kerry Katona look normal. Insomnia at night, and such tiredness during the day that I threated to lie on the floor of Tesco's when the pharmacist refuse to give me iron tablets.

And those fluttery little baby kicks that actually feel like the baby has wedged it's foot between your ribs, and what ever it does with it's hands that makes it feel like it is trying to dig it's way out.And I consider myself to have had a relatively easy pregnancy.

I've said it before on mumsnet and I'll say it again, not an illness? My fricking, torn and resculpted arsehole it's not an illness.

I would have loved to carry on as normal all through my pregnancy. I worked until 24 weeks as a waitress and then had to give up. I spent the rest of my pregnancy either in hospital or at endless checks with a constantly racing heartbeat, or sitting on a sofa. I couldn't even stand up without feeling like I'd run a marathon.

Maybe some women do take the piss a bit when they are pregnant, but some genuinely struggle. YAB (slightly) U

If I had taken it more easily I would not have put together a wooden and slightly warped bed for my toddler while pregnant.

Using my knees to make it fit set off my spd badly. What a fool I was. I did not respect my body enough, I did not take care of my body enough. I approached pregnancy as I had approached my body up til then, with harshness and sternness, verging on self harm.

I thought I was being careful with myself by making sure I was at home, having stopped work beforehand, but that wasn't enough.

Now I'm learning what care and concern for myself feel like in all areas of my life. SPD in that 2nd pregnancy was my lowest point and it came about, I think, through ignorance and lack of self care.

ROFL @ bumperlicious threatening to lie on the floor of tescos. Love it.

I was feeling pretty good in my first pregnancy, up til the last month. In my second pregnancy, I really struggled from 4 months on. I did not know it then, I had bad spd developing steadily towards me being in bed for three weeks postpartum unable to move.

YABU.

Who are you to judge how people really feal?

Yup, been there, done the painting, and the bed "building". If somebody came and called me a slacker and a moaning murtle for putting my feet up when the pain got to bad, I would have smashed a creamcake in their face (If I had one handy)

YABU.

I'm really glad you were healthy and strong during your pregnancies.

I'm really glad you were able to do everything you used to.

I was so fit when I fell pregnant with DD1 I can't believe I used to exercise that much.

Within weeks I was so weakened by constant vomitting I could barely function.

From there, I developed acid reflux so bad I got an ulcer in my oesophagus.

I had high blood pressure and oedema so bad I could barely walk.

Second time round, had anaemia, oedema again, and more hypertension.

I also had antenatal depression.

How's the weather up there on your high horse?

I have been desperate to carry on being active and not letting pg slow me down
it has been impossible for me
I am in pain and discomfort a lot of the time and feel like I have been hit by a brick on afternoons where I have done physical job in the mornings

please bear in mind when looking at the lives of pg women in other countries that loads of them will be about 19

and that many of them will die giving birth

I think the thing is that fatigue, like pain, is subjective.

AND I have found this time round that most people seem to have the attitude that pg women should carry on regardless

I have stood at bus stops while people stared openly at my bump and didn't offer me a seat, etc

my 5 year old has to help me in the supermarket because no other bugger does!