Being pregnant was very much like falling in love. You are so open. You are so overjoyed. There's no words that can express having a baby growing inside of you so, of course, you want to scream it out and tell everyone.
I did a lot of work with myself over the course of being pregnant and the first few months of being pregnant. It's nice, the pace of being pregnant; it gives you a long time to not just germinate a baby but germinate the mother that you're gonna be.
A part of me isn't like those women who love being pregnant. I love my baby, and I miss that feeling of being attached to him when he's kicking, but I was so ready to not be pregnant.
All my friends were in the park smoking weed and getting pregnant. I didn't want to be the young black girl having a baby, a baby's father, being on welfare. That wasn't going to be my story.
I don't particularly like being pregnant. I like the baby at the end. Pregnancy is a very distant thing for me. I can't seem to believe there's really a baby there. It's such a miracle.
Language just gradually came in, one or two stressed words a time. Before then, I would just scream. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my words out. So the only way I could tell someone what I wanted was to scream. If I didn't want to wear a hat, the only way I knew to communicate was screaming and throwing it on the floor.
Something inside Clary cracked and broke, and words came pouring out. 'What do you want me to tell you? The truth? The truth is that I love Simon like I should love you, and I wish he was my brother and you weren't, but I can't do anything about that and neither can you!
Going through that traumatic time of being heartbroken and then being pregnant turned my whole life upside down and inside out and just knocked the wind out of me. But I got so much out of that.
First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.
I remember when I got pregnant, I had several peers of mine, women, who said to me, 'Now that you're pregnant, you're probably gonna give up the music thing, right?' I was like, 'I'm not crippled. I'm just having a baby.'
?She didn't understand what it was like to be filled with a love so strong that it made your chest ache—a love you could only feel and not express. Keeping love buried was a lot like keeping anger pent up, I'd learned. It just ate you up inside until you wanted to scream or kick something.
I've always talked about having a strong maternal instinct... when Mum was pregnant with Alfie, everyone kept saying that I was going to be really jealous of the baby. I took it upon myself to go against what everyone expected and look after him.
The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like 'Your life will be completely different.' It's true.
Someone told me recently, "You're like Oprah, man. People will tell you anything." I'll ask questions and I don't care. If you don't want to tell me, that's fine, but it's not going to be aggressive. I'm open, too. And no judgments. It's a combination of being willing to ask the questions, and being very open myself.
I'm not very much an open book, I do really express myself only through my music and when I'm in that safe environment and I don't have to let anything go out of the studios that I don't want to go out.
I loved my second trimester! I didn't feel sick anymore and had more energy. My bloated belly turned into a baby bump, and I definitely looked pregnant. That was a relief because when I was around 4.5 months, you could see people having this inner monologue with themselves, wondering if I ate too much pizza or if I was pregnant.
We lost a baby at 11 weeks when I was 34, and we got married expecting we would have no trouble having another child, because I'd fallen pregnant that one time. But it just didn't happen and we did about four years of IVF, trying very hard to have a baby.