The nausea was never just nausea

The mooing surprised me.

Reading through a thread about pregnancy and AuDHD, someone mentioned that when the nausea was at its worst, she started making sounds she couldn’t stop. Low. Rhythmic. She was embarrassed about it. Wrote it like a confession.

I know why she was doing it. Her body was trying to regulate through an overwhelm that language hadn’t caught up with yet. That’s stimming. That’s what a nervous system does when it needs to survive the next ten minutes and nothing else is working.

The part that stopped me wasn’t the sounds. It was the line that shows up in nearly every thread about this: I don’t know why this is so hard. Women do this all the time.

Your nervous system was already running at max before any of this started. You have been managing your sensory load for years, not always well, but managing. Pregnancy arrives and doubles the inputs. Smell turns hostile. The sensation of something growing inside you: constant, pressing, impossible to tune out. A rogue smell from three rooms away. The texture of toast, previously safe, wrong this morning in a way you can’t explain. A sound that wasn’t a problem yesterday is suddenly unbearable. All of this while also managing the basic mechanics of being a person.

Other women do this too. Yes. But most of them aren’t also running the background processes: the environmental monitoring, the constant recalibration. The low-level effort of just existing in a body that talks at high volume all the time. Most of them aren’t starting the first trimester already down a quart.

What nobody says out loud is the thought that comes in the middle of the worst of it. Not: I don’t want this baby. You want the baby. But: I cannot stay in this body for seven more months. Something has to stop.

The guilt around that thought is a separate ordeal. You chose this. Other women manage. You are doing it wrong.

You aren’t doing it wrong. You are doing it with a nervous system that has never had easy access to its own limits, suddenly past all of them at once.

Some women didn’t know they were AuDHD yet when they were pregnant. Thought the overwhelm was anxiety. Character. Something to push through harder. Spent nine months blaming themselves for something they couldn’t name.

It had a name the whole time.