One Day You'll Thank Me

by Cameran Eubanks Wimberly

  Because I’ve always had a very fast metabolism, I have a hard time putting on weight. (I know, I know, cue the violins. But actually, for the most part being so thin actually made me very insecure for a long time. In middle school, I looked like I had an eating disorder and was teased horribly.) So I loved having curves for the first time in my life, as well as boobs, when I was pregnant. Yes, boobs. Actually I had melons! For someone who had stuffed her bra since puberty, this was amazing. If you’re like me, you’ll find this very exciting, but just know that nothing lasts forever, and even those perky cantaloupes turn into tea bags when you stop breastfeeding. (Sorry!) I hoped at first that I would easily find non-maternity clothes that would transition my changing body through pregnancy. To me, maternity wear signaled frumpiness, so I tried to avoid it for as long as I could. At first, I would wear my pre-pregnancy jeans and just leave them unzipped and unbuttoned. (Think: your great-uncle after Thanksgiving dinner. Not a great look.) After this, I tried buying larger sizes in everything. Well, this lasted until I was twenty-seven weeks along and woke up one day and thought, Screw this… I’m uncomfortable. I went to a maternity store and tried on the most glorious pair of maternity pants. I could actually breathe! I bought three pairs and had to take back every single negative thing I had said about maternity wear. It became my BFF! I had no idea how cute and affordable some of it would be. It got very real when I googled maternity underwear. Of course, by the end you could have put me in a muumuu with cats on it—and I felt like I needed a muumuu—and I wouldn’t have cared. Jason wasn’t going anywhere at that point, and who was I trying to impress?

  While we’re on the subject of clothes, I am so embarrassed by the amount of clothes/shoes/accessories I bought for Palmer prior to her birth. Here’s a tip for new moms: babies don’t need shoes. Especially newborns. In fact, newborns look absolutely ridiculous in a pair of shoes. Save your money! Spend it on a nice bottle of wine. Another waste of money: the copious amount of hair bows that I bought. You are not a proper Southern baby girl without a giant bow on top of your head, and Southern women will find a way to affix one to even the slightest sprig of hair. Even one strand of hair gets a big, fat bow. Well, Miss Palmer Wimberly was a rebel from the start and decided bows were not for her. She immediately yanked out every single one I tried to put in her hair. Come to think of it, her first phrase at one year old was actually “No bow!” To this day she still won’t wear one. I gave away every single one I bought—and there were probably seventy-five of them.

  I’m not going to lie: before I got pregnant, I was not one of those women who thought pregnancy was beautiful. In fact, I was the opposite; I thought it was kinda gross—a point of view I never shared with anyone. I was also petrified to cook a kid for nine months. I thought I would hate it and feel like I had an alien inside of me. On top of this, as a control freak, I find the unknown terrifying. Up until I got pregnant, I had control over pretty much all aspects of my life, including my body. But I ended up being amazed and in awe of the whole experience. Seeing my body change was pretty cool. It gave me a newfound respect for being a woman and seeing what we are actually capable of. Holy shit, I am literally growing a tiny human in my gut. I was so grateful that my body was able to carry out this process, especially knowing that so many women have difficulty doing so. Even if you’re petrified of being preggo like I was, just remember that something like 90 percent of the things you worry about will never happen anyway. (It’s a quote I think I heard once.) Well, it’s true. Pregnancy was WAY easier than I thought it would be and if you just try to relax and take it all in, the reward at the end is worth every minute of morning sickness, the gas and the stretch marks, too.

  Chapter Five WHAT I DIDN’T EXPECT WHEN I WAS EXPECTING

  If you are a mom, you are a superhero. Period.

  —ROSIE POPE, MOTHER OF FOUR

  Although there were lots of things about being knocked up that I anticipated, there were plenty I did not. Stuff no one told me about. I didn’t know that Gas-X and MiraLAX would become my ol’ faithfuls for nine months (MiraLAX was my nightcap many evenings) and that instead of feeling cute and sassy, I’d feel bloated and constipated. My once firm butt deflated and looked like a block of cottage cheese and my belly was no longer hard. My back also started to hurt as I got bigger. (Support wear was a game changer because it lifted my bump and supported my core.) Clearly, it’s God’s intelligent design that women, not men, are built to carry children. I don’t think they could handle it. I also became a germaphobe during the last few months. Jason works in a hospital, and I was not having any of those germs in my house. So I would make him strip off his scrubs and get naked in the garage every day before he came inside. He told me I was psycho, but this turned out to be good practice for the coronavirus pandemic just a few years later. To my surprise, it also never bothered me that strangers touched my stomach. I found it endearing in a weird way… well, except the one time a man touched it. That was odd and kinda creepy. Note to men: don’t touch a pregnant woman’s stomach unless you are related to her and have permission.

  I also didn’t expect that seemingly everyone would offer their unsolicited opinions on pregnancy and child-rearing. I’d get questions and comments from friends, strangers, the cashier at Wendy’s, you name it. They’d ask, “Are you gonna get an epidural?” “Are you gonna wash all her clothes before she wears them for the first time?” “Are you gonna put her in the crib on the first night?” My answer was always the same: “I have no idea what the hell I’m gonna do. I’ve never done this before!” To be honest, I didn’t even know those things were, well, a thing.

  Then there were the hundreds of messages on Instagram asking if I planned on breastfeeding my child. So many of them that I actually thought about deleting my account forever. Why did so many strangers care if I was going to put my child on the boob or not? My response? First, it was none of anyone’s dang business how I planned to feed my child. I was going to try to breastfeed, but if it didn’t work, I was not stressing out. I planned to pump. If pumping didn’t work, I was happily going to stick a bottle of formula in my baby’s mouth and she’d turn out just fine. That’s the way I was fed, along with millions and millions of other people, and we’re all okay. Now, if good old formula didn’t work, my final plan was to go to Chick-fil-A, get a number-three value size, put that in a blender and spoon-feed her, something I was fairly certain she’d like because she’d just eaten a heck of a lot of it for nine months anyway. And when it was time for her to eat baby food, hell no, I was not going to be making my own as so many inquiring minds wanted to know. Instead of pureeing my own peas, I’d be buying Gerber in a jar. Hopefully buy one, get one free.

  Speaking of eating, I was always hungry. Food was like a drug to me when I was pregnant. And when you’re cooking a kid, everything tastes so, SO much better. I read an article that the foods you feed your growing fetus will later turn out to be those that he/she likes as a child. That could be a problem, because I did not nourish my womb with the fruits of Mother Earth. Nope. I didn’t diet one day I was pregnant and allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted. Besides the aforementioned Chick-fil-A, I ate a lot of Wendy’s, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and gas station food like doughnuts and Vienna sausages. (Don’t judge. They’re so good. The juice!) I also craved Philly cheesesteaks big-time, and there was about a two-month period when I probably ate at least one a day. The local cheesesteak shop opened at 11 A.M. and I would be there in the parking lot at 10:50 A.M. waiting for it to open. And I felt no shame. Heck, I grew up eating Happy Meals. That’s what nourished us as kids. I’m just sayin’! I still had my cup of coffee in the A.M., but I did limit my caffeine intake to only one drink a day and I took my prenatal vitamin religiously every morning. Oh, another thing… I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but I did not stomach one single piece of fruit my entire pregnancy. Not an apple, an orange or even a single grape. Why? Pregnant or not pregnant, I literally never eat fruit. EVER. I have taken bites and they h
ave all been spit out. I can’t swallow it. My body is not capable. No lie: if you told me you would pay me a million dollars to eat a banana or an orange, I couldn’t do it. It’s a texture thing. It’s funny, too, because when I got my blood work back early in the pregnancy the nurse looked at me and said, “You must be a healthy eater.” I laughed. Boy, did I have her fooled. And not just that nurse. I actually lied to my ob-gyn and told her I did eat fruit (sorry, doctor!), but I didn’t. (I did eat a few veggies during pregnancy, but my diet primarily consisted of meat and carbs, and that’s probably why I developed cellulite on every square inch of my body.) But don’t judge me, because Palmer is fine and smart and over 50 percent on the growth charts. So I actually think the cheesesteaks helped. In the end, I gained about thirty-five pounds, which is within the recommended range. I have always been naturally thin, so I think my body needed the extra weight for a healthy pregnancy.

  As the months progressed, I felt the baby toss and turn all the time—and it’s pretty freaky to see your stomach move and know it’s not gas. It amazed me so much that I found myself reaching for my cellphone to record the movements to show people later. The first time I felt Palmer kick, it was surreal. It actually felt more like a little flutter. Wow… there is actually a tiny human inside of me! I thought. Feeling Palmer move definitely made pregnancy feel REAL. It’s funny, because before I got pregnant I was actually kind of repulsed by the concept of feeling a tiny body move inside my stomach. How do women actually enjoy this? I wondered. I surprised myself because not only did I enjoy the kicks and movements, I actually found it to be fascinating and cool. It was also very comforting as a sign that she was growing and healthy, so I looked forward to her daily little backflips and somersaults. Toward the end of my pregnancy, her movements looked like a scene from Alien, and Jason and I would just watch in absolute wonder!

  Overall, I had an extremely easy pregnancy. I had no severe medical complications, I had relatively good energy and I only felt nauseated the first few weeks, but even that was never bad. In fact, the worst part of being pregnant was constantly having to pee during my third trimester. I’m not sure if Palmer was sitting on my bladder in a weird way, but I literally had to pee All. The. Time. Part of my nightly ritual is to take a bath. Once when I was around thirty-nine weeks, I was lying in the tub, feeling totally relaxed. The bath had finally filled up and I had to pee so bad, but I didn’t want to expend the energy it would take to get up out of the water and dry off just to use the toilet. So I just lay there and peed in the tub. I remembered Jason saying one time that pee was sterile, so I thought, What the heck. That was a low point!

  All in all, I was pleasantly surprised that all the fears I had pre-pregnancy were gone and if anything, my anxiety actually decreased. Instead, I felt a sense of calm—yes, total calm—for most of those nine months. In fact, I was so mellow that I kept waiting for my hormones to kick in. Many women told me they were emotional messes when they were pregnant, but I didn’t feel that way at all. No highs and lows. No crying fits. In fact, I never shed a tear. Not one. (Which left me wondering if I had a dead heart.) I think it was because I still couldn’t even process that this was MY child.

  I guess I wasn’t your typical mom-to-be. I was clueless and in denial, and that was fine with me. In addition to my drive-thru diet, I was not ready to give up my explicit rap music. Come on, can babies really hear from inside the womb? And if so, isn’t Notorious B.I.G.’s “Get Money” just a lesson in economics? And by the time I was nearing my due date, I still hadn’t taken any Lamaze classes or read the pregnancy bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Early on, I was scared off when I signed up for a pregnancy newsletter and the first email was headed “Nine facts about your vagina.” Oh Lord! The only thing I’d done was watch a YouTube video of childbirth, which made me dry-heave. (Don’t try that at home!) But as the weeks and months progressed, I decided to do my due diligence and meet with a birthing instructor. It was really nice, and having her actually come into our home and do it in private was comforting. She gave me a huge binder of information that I still have.

  “If you could visualize your perfect birthing experience, what would that be?” she asked.

  “I would pick my baby off a tree and not have to have her emerge from my body,” I said. Not an emotional answer, but the God’s honest truth. I didn’t want to go through labor, have my vag all messed up and swollen, and then wind up with the baby coming out the sunroof—a.k.a. a C-section. Around thirty-seven weeks, my ob-gyn asked me if I had a birth plan. I shook my head.

  “Do whatever is best for me and the baby,” I told her.

  “Smart… thank you,” she said. I could tell she probably didn’t get this response that often. As an anesthesiologist, Jason witnesses babies being born every single day. I knew from his many stories of birth plans gone wrong that the smartest thing I could do was not have one at all and leave my fate in the hands of the medical professionals who do this daily. For the second time in my life since deciding to get pregnant, I gave up control.

  However, I did do one important thing to keep myself calm and this is where I want to talk about visualization, because I think it’s important and that it actually works. In my early twenties, I read a book called Manifest Your Destiny by Dr. Wayne Dyer and it was life-changing for me. In a nutshell, Dr. Dyer teaches that you ultimately become what you think about, which is why our thoughts are super important. When I was pregnant, every night before I went to sleep I purposely envisioned an easy, uncomplicated vaginal birth. I would close my eyes and see myself lying on the hospital bed in the delivery room with my feet being held. I visualized myself breathing and pushing and the baby coming out easily. It was never a wish, it was never a prayer… it was just a knowing. Of course, I was always okay with the idea of a C-section if that’s what was best for me and the baby, but in all honesty I wanted to prove wrong that nosey ob-gyn friend of Jason’s who I told you about earlier. It was years before I even thought of getting pregnant, when she had looked at my hips and told me I was a “textbook C-section.” Also let me add, having a C-section is in no way a failure. Sometimes it’s a necessity, and some women might even prefer to opt to do it. Again, YOU need to do YOU! All that matters is that mama and baby are healthy.

  Although I have never been a neat freak and small amounts of clutter don’t bother me, that all changed around week thirty-eight of my pregnancy. I had read about the nesting instinct and found it fascinating. Nesting is basically insane housekeeping during the last weeks of pregnancy in preparation for the baby to arrive. Well, it’s like some other being overtook my body. All of a sudden, I was organizing everything and I was also throwing out everything. I found myself yelling at Jason, “Do we really need this? We haven’t used this in three years. It’s going in the trash” or “This could hurt the baby” or “This could poison the baby.” I threw out bags and bags of stuff. I also cleaned the house thoroughly for probably the first time ever. We have never had a cleaning service because… well, I’m cheap, so I have always been the maid. But I had been a crappy one. OMG, suddenly I was like, “There is dust on the blinds,” and had to clean them. I took books off the shelves and wiped behind them… something that had never been done. I mopped. I disinfected. I turned into a Merry Maid on crack for about a two-week period. My house had never been so sparkling clean.

  As you can see, I was blessed to have a generally easy, uncomplicated pregnancy and seemed to be handling it pretty well. That was until week thirty-nine. By then I was over it. And I mean OVER IT. I was still whiling away the days in pregnancy purgatory. I couldn’t sleep, was super uncomfortable and just wanted to hold my baby—in my arms, not my stomach! Filming Southern Charm so late in my pregnancy was difficult, too. I was tired, on edge and really had no desire to party or be out late like the rest of the cast. Luckily, my friends and the production crew knew and totally understood, and they did everything in their power to accommodate me.

  After an appointment approaching m
y thirty-ninth week, I learned I could be voluntarily induced a week early to term, which is forty weeks. This is where you go in and are started on a Pitocin drip to jump-start labor. I was impatient, and this appealed to me as a relatively controlled situation.

  “How soon can I be induced?” I asked my ob-gyn.

  “On Tuesday,” she said.

  “Great! Pencil me in,” I replied happily. Make that VERY happily. When I called Jason on the way home from the appointment to tell him, he was very laid-back.

  “Is it scary to get induced?” I asked him.

  “No. It happens every day,” he said. Before you think he’s heartless, Jason is an anesthesiologist who gives epidurals to pregnant women all day long, so he was understandably desensitized. But this was the first time for his wife! A little sympathy would have been nice. Still, I was excited about being induced. I thought, This is awesome! No water breaking in the grocery store. No rushing to pack my hospital bag. I would simply check into my hospital room, get hooked up to some IV drugs to start my labor and have a baby in twenty-four hours! Ha ha ha.

  The following week, nothing had changed in my nether regions, so I packed my bags and headed to the hospital to get induced. I remember leaving my house, wistfully thinking, Wow. This is the last time I will be at my house without a kid. Boy, was I wrong. My baby was saying, “Not so fast, Mom,” because here’s what happened. At the hospital, I was put on the Pitocin drip, which makes your body have contractions that you can track on a monitor. Although my contractions were so massive that they looked like earthquake activity and I could feel them, my vag was not having it. For whatever reason, inductions don’t work on this body, and my cervix was not responding to the Pitocin! By hour twenty-three, the nurse had turned the Pitocin up to the legal limit the hospital would allow. When nothing happened, she told me, “Your cervix is a steel trap.”