What’s Gonna Go Wrong?

What’s gonna go wrong?  Something has to go wrong, right?  I can’t possibly have a perfectly healthy baby… Why?  Because.  Just because.

 

Pregnancy is a perfect time for incessant worriers to feel normal again, because most other pregnant women are also worrying too much. Fears come into your head, like…

 

1. The baby will be missing an important body part.
2. One of the body parts will be all messed up.
3. There will be some terrible defect, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives taking care of him or her.
4. The prescreening tests we had done were wrong.
5. I got hammered before I knew I was pregnant and have definitely caused permanent damage.
6. I stood in front of the microwave for too long when making dinner last week – what have I done??
7. I accidentally got impregnated by the mailman and didn’t even know we had sex!

 

Whatever the worry is, it may spend a lot of time worrying you.  And what’s worse: there’s nothing you can do about it.  But the fact is that your chances are extremely likely that your baby will be perfectly healthy. 

 

So what to do about these fears… Talk them out with other mothers; write them down, so you take a real look at them, instead of watching them swim around in your head; and every time a worry hits you, take a breath – one night of boozing won’t hurt your baby, a session with the microwave won’t hurt your baby, the prescreens were probably correct, and you would know if the mailman came to dinner, because your magazines wouldn’t arrive all torn up.