My mom described the feeling as “butterflies in your stomach; little flutters.” This brings to mind a whole rash of warm fuzzy things: bright happy colors, snuggly feelings, yellow sunshiny joy… When I finally recognized the feeling as actually coming from the baby, it was not little flutters, it was weird gut lurching and muscle twitchy feelings. As much as I try, I just can’t reconcile the feeling with butterflies. I associate the feeling with the movie Alien.

Turns out I am nowhere near alone in this, Alien, it seems, has affected an entire generation of pregnant women. (Much in the same way that Psycho affected the generation of women before us—well, a little different maybe…) From what I can tell, most women seem to describe the feeling as both “creepy” or “pod-like,” and “pretty cool.” I guess that’s about where I stand on it. It’s a fascinating and reassuring feeling, like, “yup: baby in there!” Then, somewhere off to the right of my belly button, a part of my belly pokes out visibly and makes a beeline for my ribcage; and then I think about Kane.

Specifically, that part just before Kane loses it at the dinner table; he stops talking and gets this glazed far-off expression. It occurred to me that perhaps right before the baby alien started violently tearing through his abdominal cavity, it squirmed around a little, maybe poked one of his internal organs with a cute little baby alien foot. That look on Kane’s face though… Anyway, I can relate because I get that look a lot these days.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under pregnant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.