So you know how when you’re pregnant you sort of stay pregnant for nine-ten months and then you give birth to this little bundle of joy and on the surface you forget all the misery you’ve been through to get to that point, but in the back of your head it’s always sort of there, just hovering, like there’s no way you can experience all that—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—and then NOT have it somehow change you for the rest of your life, like you can never go back to being a person who hasn’t given birth?
Well, I’m pregnant that way.
Only I’m not quote-unquote with child.
I’m pregnant with my education.
Eighty months pregnant, to be exact. (Eighty months as in nearly seven years.)
If you think it’s rough being at the last week of your third trimester, just think how I feel at this point: I’m in my twenty-sixth trimester of my Bachelor’s degree. I am SO CLOSE to being finished, but there are still so many hurdles—most of which seem insurmountable, probably about as insurmountable as unassembled cribs and unpainted nurseries seem to big fat pregnant women whose, I don’t know, quadruplets are due in two days and who have no health insurance, either. They know the quadruplets are going to come. They know that somehow they will get the cribs set up between now and then.
They just can’t fathom how.
I have pregnancy hormones. Pregnancy weight gain. Pregnancy stress marks. Pregnancy bladder problems/insomnia. Pregnancy constipation. Pregnancy acne. Pregnancy eczema. Gestational diabetes. Prenatal fatigue. Cankles. Varicose veins. Pregnancy cravings.
I have all the worst symptoms of pregnancy without even the added benefits of cute maternity clothes, luscious hair, or glow of any type.
And after eighty-four months, to show for all my discomfort, I will give birth to a $20,000 piece of paper, which will neither cuddle nor look cute for nakie pictures.
After eighty-four months I will officially be educated.
So then why do I feel so very dumb.
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