The Bizarre First Half of Pregnancy

After moving through every obstacle IVF could throw at us and finally, joyously getting pregnant (yaaay!), we were told we’d be continuing those painful, irritating, and absolutely necessary progesterone shots all the way through the first trimester. Early pregnancy is fascinating in its own strange way, since doctors calculate “Day 1” from the start of your period in that cycle. Which means for the first two weeks, you’re technically not even pregnant yet. You ovulate around week two, conceive shortly after, and typically find out around week four. The first trimester runs through week twelve, so I still had ten more weeks of shots ahead of me. Every single day. Same exact time.

That meant a lot of variety in how those shots got administered. Most days, Michael gave them to me at home. Some days, I gave them to myself on the road while driving around working on a book about strange places around Virginia. And on a couple of occasions, when I wasn’t quite brave enough to do it myself, some very good and very understanding friends stepped in to give me a progesterone shot in a parking lot. Home, car, parking lot. It didn’t matter where. It never got easier. If anything, the shots got worse the longer they went on. The injection sites swelled more. They bled more. My muscles ached more. By the end of those twelve weeks, my backside hurt constantly.

But it was worth every single one of those shots for the baby boy we were growing.

The Challenges of Early Pregnancy

Going into pregnancy after a recent miscarriage changes everything about how the first trimester feels. You get an ultrasound and graduate from the fertility clinic around week six. Then you don’t get your first official ultrasound with your OB until week ten. In between, the appointments are few and painfully far apart. And since you can’t feel the baby move until as early as week sixteen, that stretch is filled with a quiet, nagging question that never fully goes away: Is he okay? How would I even know if he wasn’t?

One day, someone cut me off in traffic and I had to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. Afterward, I noticed light bleeding. It’s common enough at that stage, since the tissue is still delicate, but common didn’t make it any less terrifying. Every day that passed without a doctor confirming everything was fine felt like its own small test of nerves. There’s no way to feel the baby move that early. There’s no way to know for certain until a doctor sees him on a screen or hears his heartbeat out loud. So I kept eating as healthy as I could, slept every chance I got, and moved through each day carrying hope instead of certainty.

That first trimester came with its own strange physical education, too. My uterus felt “off,” in a way I’d genuinely never experienced before. I could feel it. Constantly. Its presence, its shape, its difference. And oddly, as my blood volume increased, I regained the ability to sleep with my arms above my head without them going numb, something that hadn’t been possible in years. It sounds small, but in those first couple of months, sleeping like that made me feel whole in a way I can’t fully explain. The nausea, thankfully, was mild. The fatigue was not. I went from powering through twelve-hour workdays to barely making it through a normal one, some days struggling just to stay awake.

The Second Trimester

By the time I reached the second trimester, I felt confident. We’d had our twelve-week scan, and he looked like a perfectly healthy little baby. Something in me finally settled into just knowing he was there and knowing he was going to be okay.

Everyone told me the second trimester would bring more energy. For me, it did the opposite, at first. At week twelve, it felt like a veil had dropped over my entire head, and exhaustion followed me through every single day. I took one or two accidental naps a day just trying to keep up with normal life. Work got harder. Everything got harder. And I was in the middle of editing three books releasing that fall, working full time, and filming season three of the show. Exhaustion became the single biggest obstacle I had to push through, and somewhere along the way, checking things off my to-do list stopped mattering quite as much as it used to.

Then, at week sixteen, I felt him move for the first time.

Sixteen weeks is early to feel movement in a first pregnancy, but my doctors explained that because I’m thin and his placenta sat toward the back, every little kick and twist landed directly against me instead of being cushioned elsewhere. What started as small twitches slowly grew into real kicks, twists, and turns. By week nineteen, I could tell when he was asleep and when he was awake. I was learning his schedule.

On my birthday, at week eighteen, I woke up at 7 a.m., fully alert, fully alive, for the first time the entire pregnancy. It felt like the veil had finally lifted. I turned to Michael, practically glowing with energy, and told him what a perfect birthday gift this was. He just looked at me, a little alarmed, because he’d genuinely never seen me wake up at 7 a.m. happy about it before in my life. As of today, at week twenty-one, that energy has stuck around.

Back to his movements, though, because they’re the part I keep coming back to. At twenty-one weeks, I’m still adjusting to the strange reality that there’s another entire person living inside me, one with his own schedule entirely separate from mine. He sleeps when I don’t. He’s awake when I’m not. He has his own rhythm, his own patterns, his own personality quietly taking shape somewhere deep inside my uterus. It’s bizarre. It’s wonderfully, unmistakably weird.

We’re at twenty-one weeks now, and baby Tristan is happy and healthy. His twenty-week scan went beautifully, and he moves constantly. This whole experience has been strange and magical and, once I moved past the fear and uncertainty of those early weeks, genuinely perfect. It’s been a wild adventure so far, and I can’t wait to see what the second half brings.