Sense By Meg Faure Podcast Season 8 Episode 196
Title: A Miraculous Beginning: Pregnancy is Not Perfect
Transcript
[0:00 – 1:04]
Meg Faure (Intro): Pregnancy is often talked about as something we need to get right. The right supplements, the right food, the right mindset. But what if pregnancy is not a test that you pass or fail? Well, in this episode of Sense by Meg Faure, we explore what pregnancy really is. A powerful foundation phase where your baby is growing, adapting and preparing for life, while your body is doing something nothing short of miraculous. Today, we unpack what the science actually tells us about early pregnancy, how your baby’s brain begins developing before you even feel kicks, why your changing body begins to feel very unfamiliar and why that is normal, and also how to let go of the guilt when pregnancy doesn’t look perfect. And I’ll answer one of the most common and anxious questions that I hear from pregnant women. And that was, “I didn’t know that I was pregnant at first and I drank alcohol, I wasn’t taking folic acid. Have I already harmed my baby?” So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, unsure or quietly worried that you’ve already done something wrong, then this episode’s for you. And if you know a pregnant mom who could use reassurance, perspective and a deep exhale, then please share this episode with her, because pregnancy is not about perfection. It’s a beginning, a new phase, a transition.
[1:05 – 2:04]
Announcer: Welcome to Sense by Meg Faure, where we make sense of the science and art of parenting. Parenting is grey, gritty and beautiful all at once. And my life’s work as a healthcare professional is helping parents feel more confident in a season that can feel really overwhelming. In each episode, we share honest conversations with real moms, dive into the science with experts and simply make sense of it all in practical ways. This is your space. You’re not alone. You’re held. So let’s unpack the journey of a lifetime with Sense.
[2:04 – 5:26]
Meg Faure: Have you recently seen two blue lines on a pregnancy test? Did time seem to pause for a moment? Well, as a mom to three, I’ve experienced it three times. And it really is that kind of life is going on. You think you’re on a certain trajectory and then suddenly for a moment, life slows down. Now for Amanda, a mom I know, that moment felt almost unreal. She and her partner had dreamed of having a baby for years. They’d gone through seven long years of infertility, many, many treatments, hope rising, crashing, heartbreak, grief. And then finally they took a painful decision to stop trying. They decided to step off the emotional rollercoaster and accept a different future with no little ones. And then completely against the odds, it all happened. A natural conception. A tiny life that Amanda once believed that she would never carry. And standing in her bathroom, looking at her reflection, Amanda’s mind leapt forward in time. Would this baby be sporty or academic, sensitive or bold? Would he be cautious, fearless? Would she one day become a mother herself and make Amanda a grandmother? And then another thought arrived, quieter, heavier, but unmistakable. And that was that these nine months really matter. They matter not just practically and not just medically, but profoundly. Because pregnancy is not just a waiting period that we go through ahead of birth, but it is in fact the very first chapter of a human life story, which does start a little bit before pregnancy, in fact. But the reality is, as moms, we’ve got this deep awareness that we’re carrying a very high responsibility for a human life. Pregnancy is honestly one of the most extraordinary transitions a woman can ever experience. For your baby, it’s an astonishing time of growth. A time when they bed down the foundations for all future health and development. And for you, it’s a complete recalibration, physically, emotionally, hormonally, and socially. Your life will never be the same. And it happens slowly over nine months, but actually, it happens all at once as well. So before your mind is even caught up with what needs to come, your body already knows what it needs to do. What science now shows us very clearly is that pregnancy is a foundation phase. And it’s not about perfection, but it is extremely significant. And so when I was writing the book Pregnancy Sense, which is the book on which this particular episode is based, I started to picture a ripple effect. You drop a pebble in a pond and suddenly you start to see these ripples moving out from the centre.
[5:26 – 9:02]
Meg Faure: So I want you to imagine that. I want you to picture dropping a stone into still water. Now at the centre of that ripple, maybe it’s the stone where the stone drops, is your baby. And your baby is growing, forming, and responding. And around that baby are layers. And I would like you to just imagine the first layer is your physical health. That’s really the placenta, the uterus, the hormones, your physical body that enables your baby to grow and develop. The second around that layer is your emotional state, how you’re feeling, whether or not you’re happy about this, whether or not you are ambivalent. And then around that come your stress levels, the things that impact your emotional state, which will then in turn impact your physical health, which will in turn affect your baby. On the outside ripple of your stress levels is your nutrition. And as part of that, your environment, what goes on around you, what you give to your baby, your relationships, and then your sense of the world. And outside of that is society. And of course, once you’re pregnant, it’s almost like you are part of society. Everyone seems to have a say in what’s going on in your world and what’s coming to you. Now, each of these ripples influences the one at the centre. So all of those ripples move forward and whatever happens in your world, in your nutrition and wherever it is will impact the ripple right at the centre, which of course is your baby. Now, this doesn’t mean that pregnancy has to be absolutely perfect. It doesn’t have to be controlled and optimised at every turn, but it does mean that pregnancy is meaningful. And it means that your body and your baby are in constant dialogue as your body feeds into the development of your baby. So let’s go back a little bit. We’ve spoken about how all these ripples affect our babies, but in actual fact, our baby comes with its own kind of data sets that were also impacted. And that is of course, what’s called a genetic blueprint. Half of their genes from you, half of the genes from your partner. And that blueprint kind of carries the potential for your baby. It holds information about your baby’s eye colour, how tall they’ll be, what their temperament will be like and their predispositions in terms of health as well. And so for many years, we kind of felt like this genetic blueprint was the be-all and end-all, and that was basically the trajectory that your baby would go on. And in actual fact, at the early part of the 1900s, it was just thought that human beings were predetermined, that those genes would have the most impact. And really anything you did in life had really no impact on their development. But what we now know is that genes are not destiny. They’re kind of a script, but it’s not the finished story. How that script is performed on the stage of life depends on the environment in which it unfolds. And here we have two very powerful forces that come into play. The first one is, and we all know about it, if we’ve got nature being our genes, the first force is nurture.
[9:02 – 13:42]
Meg Faure: And nurture begins much earlier than we actually realise. In fact, your baby’s genes are already being nurtured before you even feel pregnant. For instance, are you taking folic acid? Or how much alcohol has your partner been consuming? Because alcohol does impact sperm. So there’s a lot that actually happens and plays out very, very early on. And then your baby’s brain begins to develop very early on in pregnancy. I mean, usually, before you even know that you’re pregnant, brain cells are already starting to be created in very vast numbers. And what happens during the course of the first trimester is that these brain cells are created, and they migrate to certain areas in the brain. And then once they’re in that area, they start to form connections. And this happens at a staggering rate. And these connections within the brain form the architecture for learning, emotional regulation, sensory processing, resilience, and later behaviour. So it’s a sensitive time. And what ends up happening is you’re not just having this nurture, but there is actually another powerful force that comes into play. So I mentioned that there are two powerful forces other than the genes. And the second powerful force is epigenetics. So what is that? So epigenetics is the ability for genes to be switched on and off by environmental signals. And those signals can include everything from nutrition to stress, illness, inflammation, and exposure. These signals don’t necessarily rewrite the genetic code, but they definitely do influence how it’s expressed. And sometimes they can last a whole lifetime, and actually, in fact, over multiple generations. So I will give you a little bit of example of that. Your baby’s ability to bounce from stressful situations is pre-coded into their genes. How they’re going to respond to stress is there in their genetic code. But let’s just say during your pregnancy, you’re exposed again and again and again to toxic stress. This is a very high level of interpersonal stress. Let’s just say a partner is abusing you or an environment that you live in, which is highly conflict-ridden and lots of violence, or maybe a toxic relationship at work. And so every single day, you’re kind of patterning this stress response. It goes on and on and around and around. And so what ends up happening is that that stress response and those hormones start to trigger a little bit of the same response in your baby’s brain. And so by the time they’re born, they may not have been pre-determined genetically to be acutely responsive to stress, but because of the way that your pregnancy has been, it can impact their response to stress. So you can see how they can actually divert from that genetic code. So the environment impacts the epigenetics and therefore creates a deviation from the genetics. So it is a sensitive time. And I think it’s important to understand that it is a time where we’ve got to be super conscious. And any of you who’ve listened to any of my podcasts and know me will know that putting guilt on you, putting more pressure on you is the very last thing I want to do. But it does say to us as newly pregnant moms is that we need to be very conscious. We need to approach pregnancy all the way through to birth as something that is a gift. It’s a magical period in our baby’s lives. It is a remarkable period and it carries some responsibility. The good news is, is that it is a remarkably resilient period in the human life. Babies are not born fragile. They’re super adaptive, very responsive, and they are biologically prepared for variation. So while all of this is happening inside of your baby, something unbelievable is also happening inside of you as you nurture that baby. And I always think that the miracle of being a mother is quite extraordinary. What our bodies can do is quite extraordinary. So let’s talk about that and what those changes are.
[13:42 – 15:47]
Meg Faure: Well, from the moment of conception, your body begins to change, not gradually, but actually pretty decisively. Hormones are released in massive quantities that orchestrate one of the most complex biological transformation in the human body. Pregnancy is the only time in life when your body will willingly accommodate a genetically different being without rejecting it. So you will know that if you have to have a liver transplant, they need to take down your immune reactions so that your body can actually not reject somebody else’s liver. But here we have a different genetic code. It lives inside of you and you don’t reject it. In pregnancy, your body does in fact exactly the opposite. It creates what we call an immunologically privileged space, allowing your baby and the placenta (because that’s also its own being) to exist safely within you. And you actually grow a whole new organ. And that organ is, of course, the placenta. So now the placenta is one of the greatest miracles of pregnancy. It forms an interface between you and your baby, keeping your blood supplies separate while allowing oxygen and nutrients and hormones, antibodies and waste products to move seamlessly between you. The placenta, this whole new organ, acts as a filter, a hormone factory and a life support system all rolled into one. It is quite miraculous. Moving a little bit outside of the placenta is, of course, your uterus. And because at the same time as your placenta is developing, your uterus transforms from a small pear-shaped organ, tiny little pear, into an incubator capable of holding litres of fluid and supporting a full-term baby weighing about three kilogrammes. Your muscles stretch, your ligaments soften, your blood supply increases. Every single system inside your body adapts in anticipation of birth and breastfeeding, often long before your baby actually needs those changes. So this is why for some of us, pregnancy can feel so confronting and so alien because your body no longer actually feels entirely like it’s your own.
[15:47 – 17:15]
Meg Faure: A woman, like somebody else I work with, Lucy, who was fit, healthy and active, often described pregnancy as disorientating. There was fatigue and nausea and hunger and weight gain and aches and strange sensations that came as a shock. There’s also the hyper-awareness of every single twinge and niggle, a sense of being watched by yourself, by others, by the mirror and by society. And then, of course, there’s the emotional adjustment to watching the body that once felt quite predictable become completely unfamiliar. But none of this change is random. And, you know, if you are feeling like you are not loving pregnancy, you don’t know your body, you don’t like this feeling of feeling out of control, don’t worry. You are in very good company. Lots of women are very ambivalent, even the whole way through pregnancy.
Announcer: Today’s Dose of Sense is brought to you by ParentSense, the expert-based parenting app that gives you daily support from pregnancy to sleep feeding and daily routines. Take the guesswork out of parenting, download ParentSense today, and use the code SENSE50 for 50% off.
Meg Faure: But now let’s have a little bit of a look at what really changes physiologically. So the first thing is that hormones like progesterone, oestrogen, relaxin, prolactin and HCG are working constantly. They’re softening the joints and they are increasing your blood volume. They’re preparing your breasts for feeding. And I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’re pregnant, when you look down at your chest, you’ve got all those blue lines, lots more blood flow to your breasts. They also slow your digestion so that nutrients can be absorbed more efficiently. So with whatever you were eating in the past, you’re actually getting more out of it, which is why you don’t have to eat for two at this point. But it’s also why you feel kind of bloated and gassy and too full.
[
17:15 – 20:00]
Meg Faure: And actually, I recall very well feeling fat before I’d even actually gained any weight. And even your breathing actually increases in efficiency so that you can get more oxygen into your body. Your heart works faster and your blood volume increases dramatically. Your kidneys are now able to filter more waste. Your lungs adapt to taking in more oxygen. As I mentioned, your posture shifts and your hair, feet, skin and face may actually look quite different. And for some people it’s a glow and for others, it’s like almost blemishes on their face or pigmentation. And some of the days you are going to marvel at what your body is capable of. And other days you’re just not going to love it at all. And both experiences are completely normal. And so if you’re feeling either of those, both of those in one minute, you’re in very good company. Pregnancy asks something so enormous of the human body. It is self-sacrifice at a cellular level. And yet it is also very temporary. And this is where having perspective becomes important and knowing that this certainly will end at some point. So there’s a few things that you need to know a little bit about in terms of resting up and just having perspective in pregnancy. So the one thing I want you to know is that while stimulation is very important after your baby is born for your baby’s brain to develop, the reality is that in utero, your baby doesn’t need any stimulation at all. In fact, the womb is just the most perfectly designed sensory environment to incubate a human baby. Let’s think about it. There are muted sounds, there are rhythmic movements, there is deep pressure, there’s warmth, there’s predictability. And if you are wanting to learn more about this and the impact of it on your baby’s brain go and listen to a prior Season 8 episode on the sensory world of the newborn. So when we think about the womb world, the reality of less is more really applies. So your role is not to optimise every moment, but it’s to support yourself and to think about your nutrition, your emotions, and your physical exertion as well. So accept that some things are outside of your control, but these three things really are in your control. Your nutrition, your supplements, your emotional world, and how you respond to the world, and your physical activity. So these are the things that you can impact your baby’s development on. What you eat on most days, how you rest, how you move your body, how you manage stress, and the support that you allow yourself to receive. These are the things you can control. What you can’t control, of course, is how your pregnancy unfolds, unexpected symptoms, and the exact course of birth. Unless you’re having a caesarean section, the exact day of birth as well.
[20:00 – 23:49]
Meg Faure: So one of the big growth areas, we’ve kind of spoken about the physical changes to your body, but there’s also a big change to your mental state. And one of those is to practise acceptance. And it’s such an interesting thing because when I think about your journey as a mother, and we’ve said this in many of our podcasts before, being a new mom is kind of learning to thrive in the grey. In other words, not having all the answers, being curious about how you’re feeling or what’s going on in your world, and not having it all sorted. And that learning starts in pregnancy. And I think it’s one of the most miraculous ways or gifts that our pregnancy gives to us is that it teaches us to be more flexible, to go with the flow, and to know that we have to trust a process rather than controlling it. Which, of course, for many of us, particularly if you’ve been very, very high powered before or controlling, you actually wanted to control everything. So pregnancy is not a test that you’re going to pass or fail. It is a transition, similar to adolescence. In fact, it’s being called matrescence, which is a transition into motherhood. And I can tell you, having been a mom to three, you will not emerge unchanged. And that is a wonderful thing. Often we fear change. We think that it’s going to be terrible to adjust to being a mom, to have our life dictated by a little human life. But actually, when you embrace it, it is absolutely wonderful. So as we end off, I want to just kind of spin around to a question that I often have from pregnant moms. And it is a question that comes from a position of fear, but also, I guess, the weight of responsibility as well. And that is a question around, you know, we try and control the things, which I’ve already mentioned, our nutrition, our physical activity, and our emotions. But we’re not controlling those things for a human baby often before we know we’re pregnant. And this question came through recently. They said, “Meg, I didn’t know I was pregnant for the first few weeks. I drank alcohol. I wasn’t taking folic acid. And now I’m feeling really anxious that I’ve harmed my baby before it’s even begun. Have I ruined something?” And it’s such an important question. And I want to answer it very clearly. And the answer is no, you have not ruined anything. And you’re also not alone, because many, many women have gone through that. A large percentage of pregnancies are unplanned or only discovered several weeks in. And that means that many women do drink alcohol, miss folic acid, take medications, or live completely normally in those first few weeks, simply because they didn’t know that they were pregnant. And yet the overwhelming majority of babies who are born into this scenario are healthy and developed beautifully. And this is why. In the very early weeks of pregnancy, your baby is incredibly small. And development follows what we can call an “all or nothing” principle. Either an exposure is significant enough to disrupt implantation and early development, in which case pregnancy does not continue, or pregnancy continues normally. And there’s not a lot in between. The human foetus and the little bundle of cells is incredibly resilient. And that means that if something has happened before you were pregnant, it is very unlikely to have caused harm, because you potentially would have actually lost the baby at that point.
[23:49 – 29:08]
Meg Faure: There are things that I do want to flag here, because she’s brought it up in the questions that are very important. Folic acid is very important. It prevents neural tube defects, which is cleft lips and spina bifida, amongst others. But it is important to know that neural tube defects are actually quite rare. And the body is remarkably good at compensating in early pregnancy, especially if your overall nutrition is reasonable. So the principle is, if you’re wanting to fall pregnant and you’re listening to this, please do go and take folic acid. But if you have missed it in the early stages, it doesn’t matter when you start, you should start folic acid as early as possible and not worry for the days that you didn’t actually take it. All right. The second thing I want to mention is alcohol. So alcohol is a clear teratogen. A teratogen is basically a poison to the developing foetus and to the embryo and the foetus. And there are very specific teratogens that are worth flagging. One that you probably all know about is German measles, as an example, which can result in deafness. And that affects the auditory section of the brain and the auditory nerve. Alcohol is a very clear teratogen. And the reason it’s important to flag it is that it is also our most commonly taken drug in the Western world. So it is very harmful to the developing brain, but the risk is dose dependent, timing dependent and baby dependent. So I know many, many women who have drunk a huge amount of alcohol, had a couple of binge episodes before they actually knew they were pregnant and their babies are absolutely perfectly well-developed. And actually one of them is an incredible chartered accountant adult who certainly never had any negative outcomes. It is worth knowing that as soon as you know that you’re pregnant, you want to stop drinking alcohol. The important thing with all of these principles is stop and cut these things out once you know. And this is of course what the mom in question did here and move on. Now, what I really also want to flag is anxiety itself. So I know that becoming a new mom, pregnancy, there’s so much to be anxious about. And of course, this just adds into the anxiety and the guilt, which is this, “Oh, I’ve done something wrong and I haven’t even started.” And I think it is worth flagging this right at the stage of your pregnancy is that anxiety, guilt and stress are the enemies of peace in parenting. It is so hard to parent where all you’re feeling all the time is anxious and guilty. So I want you right now to put pause on this and know that pregnancy is not about perfection and that actually guilt and chronic stress will do far more harm to your pregnancy than unknowingly having an imperfect few weeks at the start. Like everything that happens in your child’s life, it is about course correction. You are going to stuff up when you shout at your toddler and then wish that you hadn’t shouted at them. Or you’re going to stuff up when you don’t get to your newborn as quickly as you wanted to because you were wiping your other toddler’s, your other baby who’s now a toddler’s bum or whatever it is. And in all of these situations where you create either a fracture or a harm, the repair is actually where the magic happens. So life in parenting, pregnancy and postpartum is all about course correction and good mothering is doing an okay job most of the time, some of the time. And for the times that you’re not doing an okay job, repairing. Remember that your baby is resilient, your body is adaptive and pregnancy is a long and unfolding process. It’s not one single moment of getting everything right all at once. So if you’re feeling super anxious about what has happened early on in your pregnancy, do talk to your caregiver. But I do want you to know that I don’t want you to carry the weight of self-blame of having started off imperfectly and failed before you’ve even begun. This is a miraculous journey. It is a wonderful journey. It is a gift. It is a gift to you and it is a gift that you give to your baby. So from this moment forward, be conscious and what has happened in the past, let it go. And overall, enjoy your journey to being the most wonderful mom. Thank you for joining me today. I hope today’s conversation brought you a little more clarity, calm and confidence on your parenting journey. If you enjoyed the episode, please do share it with a friend who needs to hear it today and also go and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss out on an episode. I’ll be back next week with another episode, same time, same place and always here to support you. And in the meantime, download the ParentSense app to take the guesswork out of feeding, sleep, weaning, routines and everything in between.
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