Understanding pregnancy

I've been thinking for a while.  I have had 9 vaginal births.  I've been through several pregnancies.  Several births.  Some medicated.  Most were natural and at home.  I've experienced a lot.  The body is absolutely amazing.  It creates life.  It forms it and grows it inside of the body.  That life goes from being soooo tiny and just a cellular glob, to an actual human being!  Then, that human actually emerges into the world by coming out of that carrier body, and they become their own person!  How amazing and strange.

My husband still seems to not quite grasp what it's like.  How could he?!  How do you explain to someone who had absolutely no idea how this wonderful and amazing (and it really is) process can cause so much complaining??  All you do is get bigger.  Right?   Riiiiggghhttt...

I know it's hard to believe that growing another human isn't pain free.  That my hips snapping when I move, not being able to walk due to back pain from standing and doing simple and every day "easy" activities, constant pooping all day or not pooping at all for days, not being able to reach my butt to wipe, not bring able to see my feet, not being able to lift my right leg to get dressed, not being able to reach my feet to get my shoes on, being nauseous the whole time and only eating once a day for almost a year, having your genitals leak some strange substance uncontrollably, peeing yourself when you sneeze/cough/sit up/move in any direction, not being able to roll over in bed without assistance, can't sleep because being on your back you can't breathe and on your side causes hip/back/arm/leg pain, throwing up in your mouth all day and night due to acid reflux cause by everything...Even the water required to keep you alive, none of your clothes fit an you're stuck in stretchy pants, your skin burns from stretching, you skin had been stretched so much that it is now  covered in angry red stretch marks from your boobs to knees, you can't sit normal due to your fabulous belly and must sit spread eagle.

Then we get to labor.  For the men, imagine knowing that at somewhere around 40 weeks of all this glory, you will have the privilege of having someone kick you in the balls. Once you just start to recover, they do it again.  Once the pain in your gut starts to subside, yep, another kick to the nuts. This goes on all day. Sometimes longer. Then, when you think it doesn't get worse, the nut sac kicks stop waiting for you to get better. They come every 1-2 minutes. Now you're wishing for death.

Suddenly, you're at the end.  All you have to do is push an object much bigger than the exit out of you.  You know this is possible, but know that best case scenario your genitalia will be bruised and swollen.  Worst case, it gets completely ripped open.  So you push. Not to get the object out, but because continuing on with the nut kicks is too much to even fathom.  Oh my God!  It's out!!!  I'm done!

Then you find out that you get to have the next few weeks recovering with the pure bliss of bleeding out of your genitalia like a faucet, spending every 2 hours urinating fire, praying to all things that your next poop isn't as bad as the previous... which was a lot like your memory of the above situation only from your butt hole, you nipples suddenly leak, but your chesticles also get as hard as rocks and feel something close to have been in line with a direct hit with a baseball in both sides.
Ahhhh!  But the best part is that the gut wrenching but kick didn't actually end!!!  Oooh nooo!  You don't get off that easy.  You get to enjoy the feeling in your gut that you had before pushing that object out for no less than a week.  The great part about it this time is that there is nothing to look forward to at the end except for the pain to stop.

That, in a nutshell, is how to explain pregnancy and birth, in a short and not quite complete way, to men.