'Tis the season to be jolly, fa lala la la – la la F*** Off!

Oh the joys of Christmas with hyperemesis gravidarum. It's the time of year you are surrounded by food and drink and relatives who bombard you with well meaning advice about ginger and crackers and thinking positively. Tales of their wonderful pregnancies and their awful pregnancies which they “just got on with” abound along with drunken lectures about how grateful you should be and how lucky you are and how beautiful pregnancy is.

Money is likely to be tight if you've been off work for weeks or months and listening to other people moaning about feeling sick from over indulgence makes you want to commit genocide on the entire greedy nation.

I've spend three Christmas's in the throws of hyperemesis and the intervening three I was breast feeding. I shan't go into detail about my own Yule Tide experiences as family on both sides may disown me for announcing their failures on the world wide web, but believe me... I feel your pain at having to spend Christmas with hyperemesis and with people who do not have hyperemesis. This will be my first Christmas neither pregnant or breastfeeding for 7 years and I intend never to be pregnant or breast feeding ever again – that is cause for celebration indeed!

There is of course another reason to celebrate, and that is the children. On the whole, having people tell me how “worth it” the sickness is would really hurt, particularly in my first pregnancy, because I really didn't know it would be worth it... I worried often that I wouldn't bond with the baby and that if I hated pregnancy this much I might hate parenthood even more. I felt no attachment or bond to the baby, which is natural, I mean, if it weren't for the medications the pregnancy would have killed me! Those feelings were distressing, depressing and above all, secret! We had tried for 7 months to get pregnant, experienced the pain of miscarriage and I wanted nothing more than to be a mother.

But at Christmas it was the one time of year that I really did look forward to having a baby. It is hard to imagine things you have never experienced before, (like being a parent for example!), but Christmas is tenable – because we all know what Christmas is like and how magical it is for children and we can project that. I was able to imagine the following Christmas and the one after that and all the ones after that. I was excited about being Santa for the next 18 years of my life – they would be the best. I knew Rob and I would create new traditions, merged from our own childhoods. That from now on our Christmas's would be about getting up at 5.30 am to watch our children's faces as they opened their stockings. I knew I would be able to teach them about the seasons and about the light returning to the world and we would go for cold winter walks and make snowmen and eat mince pies and sing songs and tell stories and this whole nightmare would have been worth it.

And I hate to say it, particularly to those who don't yet have children, but it is worth it. It really, honestly, truly IS!

 

 

2014 update - If you are suffering this year don't forget to put Hyperemesis Gravidarum - The Definitive Guide on your wishlist!