Today I’m 18 weeks pregnant. I actually look pregnant now, something that Mr. Something takes great pleasure in telling me daily. (“You know,” I said last night, “I’m just going to keep looking more and more pregnant from this point on, so really, you can stop saying that.”)

It’s real now. Once I crossed into the second trimester, my risk of bad things happening plummeted, and all of my blood work results are stellar. We have a healthy kid in there. 

But there’s still something that keeps me from celebrating out loud, and that makes me feel like a jerk. Full disclosure: we tried for the better part of a year before we conceived, and that experience gave me some insight into how scary and disheartening and crushingly sad it can be when your body doesn’t do what you really, really want it to do. (Not to mention, what you spent the majority of your adult life trying to prevent, so it’s weird from top to bottom.) Then, when I got exactly what I wanted, I immediately started thinking of worst-case scenarios. Anxiety is a joy-sucker. 

Essentially I spent quite a bit of this year thinking I was broken, and then the first two months after I found out I was pregnant afraid to believe it was real. It’s been a surreal, stressful time. After all that, it’s difficult for me to jump into this headfirst; what if, what if, what if. 

Well, pardon my language, but fuck that nonsense. It’s time for me to get out of my head and into the world. I’m going to get rid of my nervous smile, the one that says, “I hope this works, crapcrapcrap, it’s going to work, right?” I’m all in, baby, and dammit, I’m excited.