Reality Star Admits She Hates Pregnancy, Immediately Gets Slammed For It
Instagram users shame her for complaining about pregnancy
Being pregnant can be really difficult for a lot of women, and by “really difficult” we mean “an unending hellscape of acid reflux and hemorrhoids.” It’s still, however, frowned on when women complain about it. British reality TV star Luisa Zissman got a taste of that last week when she took to Instagram to grumble about how she’s been feeling during her third pregnancy.
Zissman, who starred in the BBC’s versions of The Apprentice and Celebrity Big Brother, announced early last month that she’s pregnant with her third child, just ten months after giving birth to her second daughter, Indigo. She will have two babies under two and a six-year-old, and therefore, gets all our prayers. But some commenters hopped online to shame Zissman for not enjoying her pregnancy and therefore, they felt, not being “thankful” enough.
“Hate growing babies,” she wrote, “literally don’t enjoy anything about pregnancy. It goes on FOREVER, too…I shouldn’t moan I know but it’s no fun, thank god I adore giving birth.” If there’s any part of that statement that needs questioning, it’s the one about how she adores giving birth. But the “#sicky, #miserable, #pregnant” part? That, we get.
Most of her fans agreed with her and thanked her for her honesty, but others…well…not so much:
“#Bethankful life’s too short, many people would be praying to be in your position right now.”
“If you had been through fertility treatments you would unlikely say comments like that.”
“Funny, you have two healthy kids, third on the way and still find a way to complain.”
“Wahhhhh…All you ladies out there who side with that comment are just as lame…. Grow up and deal with it… You all knew what to expect….. Lmao Keep crying, cry babies!”
Nice. That last one is particularly helpful.
It’s true that women who want to get pregnant and are able to get pregnant on their own are fortunate, but it’s also true that they’re fully entitled to hate being pregnant and say so. As someone who had multiple miscarriages and needed IVF to conceive, I understand the pain of infertility. But how other people feel about being pregnant never has and never will have anything to do with me. It’d be one thing if I was on my fourth IVF and a friend started gushing about how she never expected to get pregnant so easily — that’s a situation in which a little sensitivity would be in order. But for some random woman to talk about how she can’t wait for her pregnancy to be over on Instagram? I don’t have a right to shame her about that. Why? Because it’s not about me.
Zissman is not responsible for anyone else’s feelings. The fact that she hates being pregnant is no reflection on anyone else’s fertility struggles, and it’s unnecessary for others to try to make her feel bad for being honest about it. Yes, there are times when it’s important for people to hear about what other people are going through so that they can have some perspective on their own troubles, but I would say that “reality star’s Instagram post about feeling ‘sicky’ while pregnant” is not one of them.
Hating pregnancy (which does, by the way, suck donkey balls most of the time) doesn’t mean you’re not thankful to be pregnant. It doesn’t mean you’re going to love your child any less than the woman who loved her pregnancy, thanked heaven every day that she was pregnant, puked up flowers, and got stretch marks that look like butterflies. What it does mean is that you’re tired and uncomfortable and in pain and nauseous and you wish you weren’t. Period.
One of the commenters summed it up this way: “I’ve had an infant loss, 5 pregnancy losses, and very scary pregnancies that resulted in beautiful babies. I HATED being pregnant. It was horrible for me. I feel no shame in saying that. #pregnancysucks”
(h/t Babble)
