I can't believe how much has changed, in the best way, since this all started up again at nine weeks pregnant. Last time these issues didn't show up until much later. I couldn't sleep on my side at all, my left hip hurt no matter how I positioned my legs, no matter which side I tried. So I slept sitting up, and that just amplified everything else. My legs couldn't drain properly in that position, so the lymphatic system, the venous flow, all of it backed up. The swelling got bad. This time I got little baby hemorrhoids at nine weeks too, something that hadn't shown up until the last trimester before.
Eight months of fascia decompression leading up to this, all that work on my posture and compression, and here I am at 4am with my left hip and glute flaring from sleeping on my side. It wasn't bad yet. Just bad enough to keep me awake, ruminating. If this is happening again this early, what does the third trimester look like with a toddler in the house?
I decided to meet it with everything I'd learned in the two years since. Called my naturopath and got herbal support for venous flow, circulation, the nervous system. Kept listening to where my body was asking for fascia work, mostly my left leg but both legs, from my lower back down. Slow. Not pushing. Trying to coax it into letting go rather than force it. I could feel myself bracing during completely normal things, walking, standing, gripping in my thighs and pelvis as my belly grew.
Then I found the physio I'd already taken Dragon to for craniosacral work. I'd seen a little of what her hands could do before it was ever my turn, so by the time I lay down for my own session, lymphatic drainage and craniosacral woven through one hour, I'd already handed her the kind of trust that lets a body actually let go.
She told me afterward I'd had a lot of twitches, which wasn't common in a first session. Most people are too distracted by what's happening to let that much happen at once.
It wasn't painful, wasn't deep tissue. It was the softest, most relaxing release I've had, nothing to grit through, nothing to survive. But I've done enough of my own work now to know release doesn't live in someone else's hands. It lives in the breath. The downshift, the expansion, the softening — that's all breath. The bodywork can only meet you where the breath has already opened the door. Someone gritting their teeth against sensation won't get the same release as someone who welcomes it in, who breathes into it instead of away from it, who lets the exhale do what it's built to do: persuade the body, not force it. So I breathed. And I let her hands and my breath have a conversation I wasn't trying to control.
I walked out of that session calm in a way I couldn't explain. I didn't know what had shifted. I just knew something had. I felt like I had taken care of myself in a way that was deeper than just the physical.
I think about the twenty-week scan last time. That's when they found the short cervix. I remember the exact moment it landed. Tim was about to head to the gym, and I told him to go, because I needed the space to myself. I sat down and cried. I remember telling myself, deliberately, that this was the grief I was allowed to have right now, and I was going to let it move through me, and then I was going to leave it there. I wasn't going to cry over something that hadn't happened yet, or focus on all the things I couldn't do. I was going to focus on what I could actually do.
And I did. I went to the physio. The chiropractor. Massages. All the right things, done for the right reasons. But underneath the doing was a body that couldn't move the way it wanted to, because every movement had a warning label on it now. No pressure on the pelvic floor. No exercise. I went from calisthenics twice a week, two hours at a time, to walking, the pool, dance classes with my husband that morphed from Latin to ballroom as my belly got larger. I wasn't still, but I'd lost the thing I actually loved, the challenge of it, the drive, the version of myself that got to chase something hard and physical. At the same time, I'd been forced into a kind of stillness I wasn't used to, and it gave me space I hadn't had before to think about the mother I wanted to be, the child I wanted to raise. Except even that thinking was preparing. I was preparing for the potential loss of the baby. Preparing for birth. Preparing for becoming a mother. Preparing for the sleepless nights. Preparing for a life that was already changing before it had even changed yet.
I barely slept, that whole pregnancy with Dragon. Some of it was discomfort. Some of it, I think now, was low magnesium I didn't know to fix. But some of it was fear I wasn't saying out loud, the fear that if we lost the baby, I wanted to have spent every possible hour close to him first. That my presence, my positivity, my staying connected to him, could somehow be part of what kept him safe. I even made myself a guided meditation, a track visualising my cervix as strong, closed, holding, and played it most nights, trying to talk my own body into safety.
This time there's no warning label. I've spent hours in the garden this pregnancy, deep squatting for however long it takes to get a bed dug and planted, out there with Dragon and my husband, not thinking about my pelvic floor at all. I understand now what those first three months of a newborn actually take from you. And somewhere in all of it, I've been tending to what my body needs before there was even a baby to justify it, minerals for my thyroid, herbs for the specific things I know I need.
I think it just felt freer, earlier than I expected it to. Calmer. People warned me the second pregnancy disappears on you, that you're too busy with the first to notice the second. Maybe there's some truth in that. I'm tired in a way I wasn't last time, because there's a toddler now, not just a pregnancy. But I don't feel like I've lost track of Phoenix. I still find the moments. Dragon puts his hands on my belly, kisses it, cuddles it, and we talk to Phoenix together about our day.
There was worry, early on, deciding what birth we wanted this time, knowing I loved my actual birth but also knowing I couldn't face being separated from Phoenix the way I was separated from Dragon after his birth. But everything past that felt different to carry. We'd already lived through the short cervix panic once, the fear of not making it to thirty-six weeks, and then making it, and knowing we were in the clear.
This time it wasn't unknown territory. We knew what we wanted. We knew what to do.
I don't think there was one moment where it flipped. It was more that once the fog of the first trimester lifted, I wanted to make the house beautiful. Not for how it looks. For what it could hold. I know what those first few months actually cost you, the sleep, the meals you don't get to cook properly, the way you give everything to a tiny person while quietly running yourself down. I've done it once already.
But it was never just the house. It was the same thing I felt walking out of that first session with the physio, tending to something in myself I didn't know how to tend to last time. So this time I'm not just preparing for birth. I'm tending to my body now, so it has less to recover from later. Tending to the house now, so it has something to give us later. Tending to the cooking, so I can relax later and still have nourishing home cooked meals. Tending to myself too, in whatever way I'm actually managing to this time.