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I'm at the doctor's for visit No. 3, or perhaps 4. He asks me how I am, and I reply tentatively in the positive.

He flips open my chart and asks how far along I am. We gaze at each other blankly for a moment, and I shrug. Timekeeping is not my forte.

He fiddles with a paper wheel; we bandy dates back and forth and conclude that I'm something like 20 weeks along. I heave myself onto the examining table. With a swift prod to my abdomen the doctor divines the top of my uterus is at the bottom of my belly button.

I am astonished at this finding. Does a uterus feel so distinct, I wonder. I cop a feel when his back is turned, but sense nothing. How does he know where it is? Can he feel the baby? What if he is merely prodding a lump of bread that has lodged in my duodenum?

But I say nothing. He has delivered more babies, prodded more abdomens, than I. It was his abdominal prodding that determined my first child was in trouble — she had stopped growing three weeks before birth because I had toxemia — so I have no reason to doubt his expertise.

Still, I wonder. I marvel at the fact that someone else can know more about the inner workings of my body than I do. I marvel when the ultrasound shows a spinning, kicking, thrashing child as I lie there feeling nothing but bladder discomfort.

There are days when the baby sits like a bowling ball on the floor of my pelvis, playing tetherball with my kidneys and generally messing about with my colon. On these days I walk like a spavined horse and whisper internally, "Get out, dammit, get out!"

I wish the baby no harm, but it has little regard for me, it seems. Separation cannot come too soon. If it has the spare time to play trampoline on my bladder, then it must be finished growing brains and heart and spleen, so it can jolly well come out and do its frolicking in the outside world.

As it wreaks mighty havoc with my nether regions, I am reminded that I am still only halfway there.

My six-year-old daughter has taken to speaking directly to my gut. "Stop giving Mummy grief," she will hiss menacingly after I return from a tête-à-tête with the toilet.

"I'm going to bring you on the trampoline when you come out," she promises, and the infant pulverizes my liver in anticipation.

"Daddy bought us fishing rods," she giggles into my navel. I feel a little bit left out. I am but a vessel. A vessel not really meant for carrying this sort of load.

I like children, but the process of bringing one into the world I find dubious. Stage one is rather enjoyable, but everything after that I take issue with. My husband has suggested that humans should evolve a marsupial-like pouch, a suggestion I have scoffed at — mostly because, evolution being the slow process that it is, it will be of no use to me.

The baby has reduced my brain to the functionality of wet cheese. I look out at the world with a glazed, fish-like stare and occasionally forget to do basic things like open doors before walking through them. At the start of the school year, I received all kinds of notes from my daughter's teacher asking for school supplies I had failed to buy, notes that I promptly lost. Oh well. School supplies are overrated. Necessity is the mother of something or other, as they always say.

A friend of mine is due two months before me. Since it is her first, I impart what slim wisdom I accumulated my first time around.

"I've been having these excruciating leg cramps in the night," she says.

"Calcium. That'll get rid of them."

She took my advice, and the cramps disappeared. I, on the other hand, forgot about the issue until I awoke some weeks later screaming, swearing and thrashing, upsetting both my husband and a small bedside table.

She bloodied her shins stumbling on a gravel road. That reminder of prenatal clumsiness should have prevented me leaping from barnacle-covered rock to seaweed-covered shore on our seaside vacation. But then, my memory isn't what it once was.

On the positive side, she can describe the agony of childbirth to me when her time comes, and I'll have forgotten all about it by the time my contractions start.

The worst part of pregnancy, though, is not the involuntary bulimia or the odd way that the hormones loosen the muscles in my jaw so it clicks in and out of place. It's not the diminished lung capacity or any of the other physical complaints that plague me. It's not even that other horrible thing I can't recall at the moment.

The worst part of pregnancy by far is the fact that I can't eat a pickle (one of my favourite foods for nearly 30 years) without some passerby giving me a wink and a nod and saying, "Do you want some ice cream with that?"

Camille Atebe lives in Mission, B.C.