I’ve been so busy during this pregnancy either a) puking or b) helping start a social networking site and company that I haven’t found time to write much–or even journal about–the bizarro incredible experience that is pregnancy itself.

Part of me has feared that “pregnant women are smug”, and pregnant women writing about pregnancy are the smuggest of them all.  In other words, to say anything in public is to risk falling in with the sanctimonious mommy crowd. Perhaps this fear has something to do with the fact that one of the only times I pregnancy blogged these past few months, over at Recessionwire, I got flamed. (Thin skin anyone?  I blame the hormones. Thankfully, the editors took the really nasty ones down.)  Of course, it probably didn’t help that I gave that post a sanctimonious title, “The Fortune Within”, though in my defense, I used that title because I had wanted to contrast the way I felt about this much-tried-for pregnancy with the major theme I’d been writing about over there–love in the time of layoff, my lack of fortune without.  But apparently some commentors felt that any woman who writes about pregnancy is, well, smug.

So here I am trying again, after recent promptings from friends, therapists, and even my business partner.  Why not write about pregnancy, these people ask me, when it’s so foremost on your mind?

Whenever I try to kick myself into writing gear, I start reading again.  I realized the only two pregnancy/motherhood-related books I’d read during this pregnancy so far had clinical titles like The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, and Twins!: Pregnancy, Birth, and the First Year of Life.  The first had been given to me by my husband, the second by my husband’s mother.  When I gave myself permission to go one step deeper, I had reached for Amy Tiemann’s Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family and Amy Richards’ Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. These books helped me feel it was possible to have a kid (two, in my case) and still have a professional life.  (THANK YOU, brilliant Amys!)  But they didn’t inspire me to write about what I was going through myself.

So the other week, I turned to memoir.  Thanks to the “Motherhood Books” group that Jennifer Niesslein formed over at SHE WRITES, I remembered I’d always wanted to read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, when the time came.  That time, apparently, is now.  Anne Lamott is so quirky, so brutally and painfully honest about the horrible things as well as the beauty, that I got inspired.  She’s the opposite of smug.  And she makes it seem ok to want to tell the truth–which for me, has not been all shiny and baby blue and powder pink.  For me, the truth of twin pregnancy at age 40 has so far been about trying to balance physical ailments of striking (yet normal, apparently) proportions with an intense struggle to slow my life down enough to make room for an impending reality for which I feel massively ill-prepared.

And so here I sit, at 5:00am with pregnancy insomnia, tiny miracles kicking around inside me, writing about writing about pregnancy.  I don’t think I’m quite writing about it yet, but hey, it’s a start.

(Does this picture make me look smug?!)