We’ve been keeping a secret…

Well, this is not a post I thought I’d be writing this year but here we go.

I’m pregnant! Wow even typing it feels weird. I’m actually writing this long before I posted because I wanted to accurately reflect on and document my experiences. I didn’t want to actually post it early days because of all the reasons, of course.

So where do I begin?

Firstly, this was planned. Weirdly not hugely far in advance though. Kyle and I moved in together in June (during the first lockdown) and enjoyed setting up our home, buying furniture and getting used to the eb and flow of life with each other and our new surroundings. Luckily being locked down together and both working from home – literally being around each other 24/7 – wasn’t hard (whew).

We began chatting about the future more and more. I’ve never been a maternal person and many times I’ve considered not having children. It’s not been a “goal” of mine or something that has greatly excited me. But being with Kyle… something changed. I didn’t have a maternal switch suddenly go on, but I felt more safe and comfortable with the idea of having a family with Kyle.

So we started talking more about it, like when we were thinking about having a family, fun baby names and how we’d tell our parents when we did get pregnant. Initially we’d agreed later next year to start trying but we were just talking about it so much and getting excited that Kyle turned to me and said “do you want a baby sooner?”.

Turns out we both did! I’m 32 (Kyle is 26) so there is somewhat of a ticking clock for me and while having a baby still seems terrifying and I have fears of my freedom and lifestyle being dramatically, well, locked down… The thought of having a baby with Kyle didn’t feel that scary or like our life as we knew it would be over. I’ve never felt maternal and I never envied my friends having children all around me. But Kyle made me feel very safe, happy and like it would be something amazing. Something we would do TOGETHER as a team.

Having a baby in my eyes has always seemed like it would change everything about my life in a bad way and my identity would change to be being “just a mother” without anything else interesting about me. While I do realise having a baby will change our whole world, I became to realise that I could still be myself as well. We could still enjoy our lives as we were (yes with sacrifices and compromises) and that a baby would add to us rather than take away from us. This shift in thinking was largely due to Kyle’s reassurances and seeing how close friends had babies that slotted into their lives rather than becoming the centre of their universe.

It’s funny because I’ve never had a rose-tinted view of having a baby. It’s mostly been all the negatives and focusing on all the hard bits. The sleepless nights, no time to yourself, the finances involved, living a less selfish life, my body changing completely outside of my control. But I never considered all the good stuff. This baby would part of us, we would be making so many amazing memories, and we would have a lot of help from family and friends. We wouldn’t be alone. Yes it’ll be hard, but hard for good reasons. Good reasons I had never considered before.

Holidays and races… two big things I love in my life which I knew would take a backseat if we did decided to have a baby. But if 2020 has taught me anything it’s that I don’t need these things to make me happy. And actually I’d achieved what I wanted to achieve for the moment in terms of running. Yes of course I want to run more marathons, especially all over the world, but having a baby doesn’t mean this will end forever. I realise it won’t be happening for a while (COVID aside) but I can still run marathons later in my life if I want to. It’s a shame that COVID has meant we couldn’t do what we wanted this year in terms of marathons and holidays and we probably can’t squeeze many holidays abroad (if at all) before the arrival of the baby in July but it just means our focus will be elsewhere for the time being. And we can still have little holidays and day trips for the time being, which I adore doing.

So we decided to start trying. Amazingly (and I know we are so, so lucky with this) it happened very quickly. More quickly than we expected and to be honest it was quite the shock. Shit got real very quickly, pardon my French. I’m going to do another post about this because it’s quite a funny story and I want to share it.

But basically I am now 11 weeks pregnant and while I can’t see any bump yet (though my boobs are gigantic it’s incredible!), I wake up every day knowing my body is doing incredible things and a constant reminder that the future is looking very different indeed…

So that’s it! I’m preggers. Up the duff. Bun in the oven. Mit baby.

I’ll be doing some more posts about how I’ve been finding the first trimester and my experiences with running, if anyone cares 🙂