My belly gets bigger each day that passes. It's getting harder to feel glamorous or stylish. I think some young hipsters call me cow this morning when I was passing by trough a coffee terrace. I actually don't care about it but I truly feel big. I am full of joy. but also full in general. I don't especially like to wear black but today it helped me to feel a little bit thinner, just a little bit.
Someone asked me to write about how I feel with the pregnancy. I would like to say: Oh! I try to not think so much about it and to let it happen casually and naturally, as the rest of things in life. But... the truth is that I think about it a lot.
To be pregnant is a truly peculiar experience. Pregnancy is a long period and you go trough lots of different feelings, sensations and experiences that mutate every day since the first one you noticed you are pregnant.
At the beginning it is more of an idea than a sensation. And if there is some sensation it would probably be sickness. The awareness of the situation grows as the baby grows inside of you. At the fifth month it starts to be a physical reality: you get to feel it inside. Then you can experience how it moves and realize that it's something independent from your body. When this happens is when you become aware of the potential of your organism and probable you are shocked too by its capability. That's the amazing part of the process. You feel powerful and your satisfaction is immense.
Until here everything is juts perfect. But, like always in life, there is another side of the coin: the darker one. You are carrying an enormous responsibility. You are the keeper of the life you are creating. That's something everybody is reminding you continuously. You see yourself in the obligation to become the best version of yourself you can be. There is no excuse anymore to not have a healthy lifestyle. Because, you know? It's not only about you, lady. In fact, it is not longer about you but about what you are growing inside. So you have three options here: You become this ideal version of yourself, or you lie about your habits or you get used to be continuously judged by others (specially by those who didn't go trough it). For sure, forget about smoking, about drinking alcohol, about eating junk food. Forget too about too much sugar, too much salt, too much caffein... Forget about being too lazy or too active. Do not take any risk! Forget about things you never thought about before in your whole life. In other words: become ascetic. The people who love you (and, as a extension of yourself, the child you are bringing) can get really, really tense. Especially when some medical complication happens, even if it's a tiny one. You get tense too and even pissed off with your body to not be good enough for the task you are realizing. Even if you know that there are certain things that are out of your control and that you aren't guilty of them, you get mad.
In my case the problem was that my cervix was getting shorter. The little one inside of me was getting ready to go out way too early to be able to survive. To avoid an early birth I had to be lying on the bed as much time as possible. But the process is actually hormonal so I saw myself in the situation of renouncing to the last enjoyable activity I had left: sex. The oxytocin is the hormone that your body liberates when you have an orgasm but it's also the hormone that promotes the birth. The orgasm relaxes the muscle (cervix) that holds the baby inside the womb too. Therefore my last and healthier pleasure was also censured. To not be able to have sex is probably the hardest think to remove from my daily life. Orgasms keep me relaxed, satisfied and connected to my body. Sex keeps me fit and connected to my partner. To not have sex increased the tension inside of me and between me and Manfred too.
This whole "medical complication" thing has been going on for the last weeks together with moving from our apartment and to another city. Manfred started a new job.... Lots of things! Now you can imagine why my blog has been a bit abandoned lately. Happily we are kind of established now. My cervix is stable and not getting shorter but I am still afraid to have sex. Now I am in my 31st week (perhaps already in the 32st) and I am in a mix of being tense, bored and horny. I look myself in the mirror and I feel proud. I cannot believe I actually manage to quit so many of my habits. I can't believe that it's being easier than I ever could imagine either. What is less easy is to make a conclusion about all things I am talking about. Oh! Pregnancy, what a complicated thing! And yet, it is the purpose of our life as human-animals on Earth.
To be pregnant is really nice. To feel the human moving inside of you is magical. But still, it isn't an easy experience. With all this fears and limitations it would be unfair to say that being pregnant is the best experience to go through. But somehow, people tend to say it. So let me make something clear: if you get pregnant for the first time do not let people overwhelm you with sweet clichés. It's actually difficult. It can be heavy, it can be uncomfortable and it can be very distressing. Not only for the mother but for the father too. To be pregnant is to feel responsibility in the most intense way. Somehow you come to think that you aren't free anymore. On the other side, to be pregnant is really empowering. So the question I ask to myself is: What of both things I really want, freedom or power? In my opinion you can't have both. The idea of total freedom is a misconception, I believe. Also, power always implies responsibility. So if you want to feel the greatest condition in your own skin do not be afraid of power. Yeah! This is what it is: Pregnancy is The Greatest Condition.
Tomorrow we'll leave Halle and we'll become Berliner citizens once again. In the two and a half years we have been inhabiting this house I never made photos of my favourite spot. Today I finally fix it and I make a memorandum of this nice place. The corner of our bedroom that invites to lay down and read or look to the garden for a whole weekend. I am excited to be back in Berlin but oh! I will miss the romantic streets of Halle, the witch house we lived in and the garden.... Oh! The garden in the spring.
There is this thing with the avocado that seems like everybody loves it. I see this fruit-vegetable everywhere, especially in cooking blogs from USA. It's difficult to find a salad that doesn't contain it. My father loves it too. I remember how he used to eat it just with some salt and pepper, taking it directly from the skin with a spoon like if he would be eating a yogurt.
I personally have a difficult relationship with the avocado: I love the taste but in the moment I decide to consume it, I get really quickly tired of it. Perhaps is too creamy or too fatty, I don't know. The only thing I know is that when I do something with this green friend, I need to combine it with lots of crunchy and fresh ingredients.
Here I show you one of the best combinations I ever did to enhance the avocado experience. The kind of salad that is a complete and satisfying meal on itself.
The photo you see below shows the ingredients I used. There, you can see tomatoes but please, ignore their presence. At the beginning of the making I thought the tomatoes would be necessary to light up the heaviness of the avocado. In the end I realised I didn't want them in. The salad came out with a really interesting taste and was fresh enough for me. If I would put the tomatoes inside, they would have taken too much presence over the rest of the flavours. Tomatoes are like this, they like to be the protagonist.
Ingredients for 2 persons
- 1 avocado
- fresh chopped parsley, generous quantity
- fresh lamb's lettuce
- chopped walnuts
- 1 freshly grated carrot
- 2 softly boiled eggs
- turkey breast -cut into pieces, seasoned with salt and pepper and fried until crunchy
Dressing
- olive oil
- honey
- full seed dijon mustard
The proportions of the ingredients are always a matter of taste, especially when it comes to prepare a salad.
I make the dressing trying out until I find the balance between the ingredients. Just mix the three components in a bowl and shake with a fork until it gets homogeneous.
This recipe is so easy to do and so easy to enjoy. It is quick to do too, so give it a try because is delicious and healthy.
