THE "THING" THAT MAKES PREGNANCY SO AMAZING AND SO DIFFICULT (FOR ME)

It has only taken me three times to figure this thing called pregnancy out.  My third time around, I still feel a lot of the same joys and a lot of the same struggles, but something happened to me recently that put it all into perspective and encompasses the true beauty and meaning behind growing a little life.  Now this may seem very trivial, but the experience opened my mind and my heart to the realization that  even the moments I feel at my lowest are part of the bigger picture.  I was listening to a song.  A song I have listened to hundreds of times.... "The Cave" by Mumford and Sons.  It is generally a great song.  I enjoy it and I have always thought that Mumford and Sons wrote beautiful music.  But on this particular day (overwhelmed by pregnancy hormones) the song was painfully beautiful to me.  It struck such a cord in my heart and being that I wept and wept every time I listened to it, and I listened to it repeatedly for hours.  I couldn't figure out what had changed in me that this song became so moving. So profound.  Then a few days later I was listening to my Script CD.  A CD I have listened to on many occassions, and also love, but nothing "moving".  Except for this night, when the song "Nothing" began to play, and I had to listen to it over and over again.  The guitar, the lyrics, his voice.....  beyond moving.  I could literally feel every emotion he was feeling when he wrote the song or when he went through what the song was about.  I could feel ALL of the pain and the anguish.  As I listened to that song for the umpteenth time, it dawned on me, what was happening, and it made everything so much clearer.  When I am pregnant I feel with my whole being, I am capable of empathizing and sympathizing to a fault.  I experience all of life's experiences with such heightened senses that I am literally overwhelmed.  This includes love, joy, excitement, anticipation, stress, anger, disappointment.  You name it, I feel it more greatly than I ever have in my entire life.  It's really quite amazing.  But, it can be a great source of hurt and frustration when those feelings of heightened awareness are expressed through anger or disappointment.  And it has always been this part of pregnancy that I never understood.  I never understood how or why I could feel so rotten or so angry or so disappointed over things that were normally so meaningless.  Well, I realized that THIS is how. If a something as mundane as a song that I have listened hundreds of times in the past can suddenly have new and profound meaning to me, then why wouldn't the fact that Jason brought home rice instead of potatoes cause me intense disappointment????  ;0).... seriously though.....  I was sooooooooo bummed.  I mean how silly.  But, I think it all has to do with protecting the baby.  Biologically, my heightened sense of awareness and being must have everything to with protecting that growing little bug.  Or at the very least making certain that he/she gets enough spuds to eat and listens to enough soul moving music.   Either way, I realized that part of the gift of growing a human life is the sudden ability to really know and experience things on a much deeper and profound level.  And along with that comes experiencing the not so great things in a more profound way.  It is most certainly nature's way of preparing us for the emotional roller coaster that is parenthood.  It's like a 10 month crash course in all of the joy, pride, excitement, love, compassion, grace, stress, anger, embarrassment, uncertainty, and disappointment that is the path of parenthood.   I guess what I am saying is, I think I can finally sit back and stop trying to fight the good, the bad, and the ugly, and just go with the flow of the hormones.  I am gonna get goofy with excitement, squishy with love, weepy with happiness or sadness, let down by disappointment, angered by perceived injustices (no matter how trivial they may be), stressed out by impending responsibility and there is NOTHING I can do to stop it.  All I can do is try to remember to bask in the good, move on quickly through the bad (and say sorry) and try to block out the ugly.  LOL. In other words -- I will cry at every stinking baby, pet, or needy child commercial or ad that I see, there is no way around it, and it is so gosh dang worth it because I get to experience the joy of growing our amazing little bug.