At the time of writing this, I am 22 weeks pregnant. My favorite room in the house, if you go by time spent there, is the bathroom. I’ve made the comment more than once to my husband that I should just start wearing diapers now instead of waiting post-partum. My biggest fear is wetting the bed.
Obviously, that’s a bit dramatic. I have all the normal, rational fears of becoming a mother: What if something goes wrong during labor? What if the baby isn’t healthy when she’s born? What if something happens to me before, during, or even after birth? What if something happens to my husband?
I even have some not so rational fears like: What if all the doctors and ultrasounds are wrong and it isn’t even a baby but a massive tumor? What if somehow the baby is born with some extremely rare genetic disorder or disease that isn’t in any way shape or form a genetic possibility based on my family history? You know, common neuroses.
But, for general conversation’s sake, and to not make anyone so alarmed they fear for my mental stability, my biggest fear is wetting the bed. I’ve had dreams where I’ve done it, only to wake up drenched in sweat panicking that I’ve sprung a leak. Any time I wake up in the middle of the night (by which I mean the seven plus times I wake up in the middle of the night), I always check the bed that I didn’t start peeing before I woke up.
Last week I had a particularly stout battle with nausea and vomiting (“It stops after the first trimester,” they lied), and ended up peeing myself and the floor well retching over the toilet. A very confused and judgmental cat that gets in trouble for peeing in that exact spot instead of his litter box watched me with disdain.
Although it’s an embarrassing story, I did tell people mostly because after the fact it was quite funny, and because being pregnant is one of the few times where such accidents aren’t judged by other adults. A few days later I found a TikTok where a woman related an eerily similar story of vomiting and peeing, and that made me feel so much better.
That relief is the driving reason I wanted to share my fear publicly. Everyone knows the feeling of being so in your own head that you think there’s no earthy way anyone else has the same fears or experiences you do. What starts out a very normal thing becomes this pit of shame in your gut because you think you’re alone.
My biggest fear is still wetting the bed, especially if my husband wakes up first and has to tell me I’ve done something so embarrassing. But I’m confident a lot of other pregnant people have that same fear. There’s no reason we should all have the same fear gnawing at the back of our minds when we could just share it – and the ultimate hilarious embarrassment when the fear comes to fruition. Besides, it may well be one of the last times we’ll be urine soaked by our own urine.