Brooklyn, Tuesday, May 12. Week 11, Day 6. Prune is the size of a lime now — apparently. I keep forgetting whether to round up or down.
Okay can we talk about the fact that I cried in the cereal aisle at Whole Foods today? Not the dramatic kind of crying. The slow, quiet, "oh god don't make eye contact with the granola guy" kind of crying. I'm fine. I'm not fine. Both things are true and I refuse to pick one.
6:14 AM — The Tab Count
I woke up before Jake. This has been happening for about a week. The baby — Prune, sorry, I'm trying to use her stupid fruit name because I read somewhere it's "bonding" — wakes me up at the exact same time every morning even though she is the size of half a lime and has, scientifically, no opinions yet.
I checked my phone. Forty-one tabs open. Forty-one. All from Sunday night. "choline week 11," "is 380mg enough first trimester," "vegetarian sources choline," "egg aversion second trimester does it pass," "Reddit r/BabyBumps choline," "ACOG choline guidelines 2025." A stranger looking at my phone would assume I was writing a dissertation. Or having a breakdown. Honestly, both feel accurate.
I closed all of them. Every single one. I just — swiped them away. And then I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark for like seven minutes feeling something I don't know how to name. Like grief? But for what? I didn't lose anything. I closed some browser tabs.
8:30 AM — The Conversation With Sophie
My sister called from LA on her way to drop Mila at preschool. Sophie has two kids and the kind of voice that makes you feel like everything is, in fact, going to be okay, even when she's just describing a parking situation.
"How's it going, mama?" she said. (She started calling me that around week 9 and I have not asked her to stop because secretly I love it.)
I told her about the tabs. The cottage cheese. The choline. The fact that I had, at one point this week, made a spreadsheet. She was quiet for a second and then she said: "Em. With Mila I tracked every gram of folate for like six weeks. With Noah I forgot to take my prenatal for an entire month and I only remembered because the bottle fell out of the cabinet. They're both fine. They're both literally the same amount of fine."
I said, "But what if I'm the one whose baby —"
"You're not." She didn't even let me finish. "You're not, Em. You're just scared. Scared isn't the same as failing."
I had to put the phone down on the counter for a minute and pretend the wifi cut out.
11:00 AM — The Whole Foods Incident
I went out to get groceries because I needed to do something with my body. The apartment had started to feel like a tab in itself — too many open windows, too much background noise.
And it was fine, actually. The walk over was fine. The sun on Bedford Avenue was that specific May light that turns everything a little gold around the edges, and I stopped and watched a guy try to teach his dog to skateboard and I genuinely laughed out loud in public, which I cannot remember the last time I did.
Then I got inside and I went to grab the steel cut oats Jake likes for the morning and I looked up and there was this woman with a giant pregnant belly — like, full third trimester, the kind where you are basically your own gravitational field — and her partner was holding her hand and they were laughing about something and she said "the baby just kicked the box of cereal" and he leaned down and put his face on her stomach right there in the aisle and that was when I lost it.
Because that's going to be me. In, like, six months that's going to be me. And I'm standing here at week 11 day 6 with forty-one tabs of choline research and a spreadsheet and a list of things I can't eat and I have not, not one single time, just stood in a grocery aisle and laughed because the baby kicked something. I have not been a person carrying a baby. I've been a project manager, micromanaging a fetus.
I cried for maybe ninety seconds. Quietly. Then I bought oranges and ginger and got out of there.
2:00 PM — Jake Comes Home Early
I didn't text him. He just came home at two. He said his standup ran short and he wanted to work from the couch. Both of us know that's not what happened. He came home because Sophie texted him. (They have a back-channel. I pretend not to know about it. They pretend I don't know they pretend.)
He sat next to me on the couch and didn't ask me how I was. He just put his hand on my knee and we watched twenty minutes of some British baking show neither of us was paying attention to. At some point he said, very casually, like he was reading a weather report, "I think you should not look at any pregnancy stuff for the rest of the day."
I said, "What if I —"
"For the rest of the day, Em."
I gave him my phone. He put it on top of the fridge, which is the official Jake Chen location for objects he doesn't want me to access, and then he said "I'm making dinner" in the tone of a man announcing a constitutional amendment.
5:47 PM — The Lentil Soup
Jake cannot really cook. He can make four things: scrambled eggs, grilled cheese, a perfect martini, and his mom's lentil soup. The lentil soup is genuinely good. It has carrots and cumin and a weird amount of lemon at the end and his mom taught him on FaceTime three years ago when he was sick and lonely in the apartment we hadn't moved into yet.
He made the lentil soup. He didn't say anything about choline. He didn't ask if it had enough iron. He just — made the soup and put it in two bowls and sat down across from me at our tiny kitchen table.
I took a spoonful and the smell of cumin hit me and for the first time in maybe three weeks I was hungry. Like, actually hungry. Not "I should eat because the baby." Hungry hungry. The way you're hungry when you've been outside in the cold and you walk into a warm room.
I ate two bowls. I haven't eaten two bowls of anything since I was eight weeks pregnant and trying to outrun the nausea.
Jake watched me and didn't say anything and at some point his eyes got a little wet and he pretended it was the cumin.
8:30 PM — What I'm Realizing
So here's the thing — and I know I always say "so here's the thing" but this one feels actually important — I think I have spent the entire first trimester treating my body like a chemistry experiment that I am personally responsible for not failing. Choline. Folate. Iron. Protein grams. Hydration. Walking minutes. Sleep hours. Tabs. Spreadsheets. Threads. Threads about threads.
And meanwhile this little lime person inside me has just been quietly, stubbornly, impossibly doing it. Without my permission. Without my optimization. Without my color-coded grocery list. She's growing fingernails this week. Fingernails. I didn't help her with that. I haven't helped her with anything. I've just been the room she's growing in, and the room has been having a nervous breakdown the entire time.
This week — week 11 — is the last full week of the first trimester. By Sunday I'll be twelve weeks. The end of the most statistically scary part. The part where I haven't told my parents. The part where I check the toilet paper every single time like a hostage. That part is almost over.
And I think — I'm not promising anything, I'm not making a vow because the second I make a vow I'll break it by midnight — but I think the second trimester might be the part where I let her grow in a calmer room. Where I close the tabs before they hit forty-one. Where I let Jake make the soup. Where I stand in a grocery aisle and laugh because something kicked something.
I'm not going to stop caring. I literally cannot. But maybe I can stop confusing caring with controlling. Maybe those are different things and I just couldn't tell because I was too busy refreshing.
10:14 PM — Right Now
Jake is asleep with one foot out of the blanket like a golden retriever. The phone is still on top of the fridge. I'm writing this longhand in the green notebook my mom gave me for Christmas (she didn't know yet) and then I'll type it up tomorrow.
Tomorrow I'm going to the bodega on the corner and I'm going to buy a single, normal, non-researched orange and eat it standing up at the counter like a person who is just having an orange.
I'm not gonna lie — part of me already wants to Google "are oranges good for week 12." Part of me always will.
But tonight, just tonight, the lime is fine. The room is calmer. And so, finally, am I.
— Em