Secret Pregnancy Quotes

Never give a lousy person the opportunity to create lousy babies.

If pregnant girls were sinner, what were liars called?

Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.

God is not crushing the dreams of parenthood when he deals the card of infertility. God is asking you to crush the idolatry of pregnancy, to be sure. And, he is saying: Dream My dreams, not yours!

Many millions of pregnancies—many if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child—were each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.

By adopting, I was not a full-fledged mother in their eyes. I hadn't paid the price of pregnancy, hadn't earned the badge of labor or the award for delivery, and would forever be an outside --an associate member at best. I looked like the other women, but I felt like less of one.

Called to the Early Pregnancy Unit by one of the SHOs to confirm a miscarriage at eight weeks – he’s new to scanning and wants a second pair of eyes. I remember that feeling only too well and scamper over. He’s managed the couple’s expectations very well, and clearly made them aware it doesn’t look good – they’re sad and silent as I walk in. What he hasn’t done very well is the ultrasound. He may as well have been scanning the back of his hand or a packet of Quavers. Not only is the baby fine, but so is the other baby that he hadn’t spotted.

The amazing thing, I think as I close the door, is that they still come. After hearing all that terrible propaganda and lies and being shown inaccurate pictures by the places calling themselves some version of a pregnancy counseling center, they still come. They are desperate to end an unwanted pregnancy

Afterward, I felt it had been wrong not telling the family about the baby, because then I wanted them to know about the miscarriage, so that they knew the baby had existed. But when I told people, they seemed more interested in the fact that I'd kept the pregnancy a secret. They felt they'd been tricked. They said things like "Oh, I did wonder that day when you didn't drink at the Easter BBQ but you said you just didn't feel like drinking!” In other words, LIAR.

Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction. Pregnancy.

Many of us are failed secret attempts to keep our parents together.

Patient RO is twenty-five years old and thirty weeks into her first pregnancy. She complains of a large number of painless spots on her tongue. Diagnosis: taste buds.

Three a.m. attendance at labour ward triage. Patient RO is twenty five years old and thirty weeks into her first pregnancy. She complains of a large number of painless spots on her tongue. Diagnosis: taste buds.

Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape--I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance--which was not chance--had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt. She had "lost" something. Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick--but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost"). And there I was at eleven years of age: She was out late at night. She was in the wrong part of town. Her skirt was too short and that provoked him. She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk. I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane--or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies. I was dirty. I was crying. I demanded comfort. I was being inconvenient. I did not disappear into thin air.

Frenchwomen don’t see pregnancy as a free pass to overeat, in part because they haven’t been denying themselves the foods they love—or secretly binging on those foods—for most of their adult lives. “Too often, American women eat on the sly, and the result is much more guilt than pleasure,” Mireille Guiliano explains in her intelligent book French Women Don’t Get Fat. “Pretending such pleasures don’t exist, or trying to eliminate them from your diet for an extended time, will probably lead to weight gain.

demedicalization of pregnancy isn’t necessarily a good thing—we should be proud of medical advances that objectively save lives, not scared of them. I

I dust a whole shelf of books on pregnancy, breastfeeding, the first six months, the first year, the first two years — and I wonder what the child care-deprived Maddy makes of all this. Maybe there's been some secret division of the world's women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy, who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fake nails and tarty little outfits — to show she's advanced to the breeder caste and can't be sent out to clean anymore.

Rooney was in the first trimester of her pregnancy with the couple’s baby. Frazer was usually more cautious with his affection, but his friendship with the rookie agent and damaged assassin had begun under extraordinary circumstances. The connection was strong as tungsten steel, the only thing that would break it was death—a real possibility if anyone discovered their secrets. “Is she all right?” he asked carefully. “She will be.

No one knows we're there, no one sees us. We never leave the room. I think about the secret voice you use when you make love. No one but that person will ever hear it. And here, we listen to each other, but we lock it in with touch, and the room vacuum seals it to stay fresh until we can breathe together again. When he breaks the silence it is to say, "I want you to know that, when you get pregnant, nothing is going to change except your dress size.

Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction. Pregnancy. Within the pure white wimple of her beekeeping suit, wrapped in buzzing,

We've never crossed paths before. I've never seen you walking down the street. I don't know the first thing there is to know about you. And the lines of my palm do not reveal nor disclose any untold secrets. Yet, here I am, holding the door as I whisper in your ear: "I'll be right across the street when you're done, my child.

Part of me just wants to force-feed these women some spoonfuls of fatty pâté. But another part of me is dying to know their secrets. Having kids who sleep well, wait and don’t whine surely helps them stay so calm. But there’s got to be more to it. Are they secretly struggling with anything? Where’s their belly fat? If this is all a façade, what’s behind it? Are French mothers really perfect? And if so, are they happy?

A horror story. Patient GL, whose genetic make-up appears to be 50 per cent goji berry recipes and 50 per cent Mumsnet posts, has announced she wants to eat her placenta. The midwife and I both pretend not to hear this – firstly because we don’t know what the hospital protocol is, and secondly because it’s completely revolting. GL calls it ‘placentophagia’ to make it sound more official, which doesn’t particularly wash; you can make anything sound official by translating it into the ancient Greek.*

The evidence abounds that not only do the self-righteous not have the market cornered on “clean living,” but they often lead secret, self-destructive lives. In my part of the world (Oklahoma is the reddest state in the union), there is actually a positive correlation between high church attendance and negative social statistics like teen pregnancy, divorce, physical and sexual abuse, and chemical dependency. Where there is denial there is dysfunction, and the more one’s faith resembles a fairy tale the sooner the clock strikes midnight.

How could it be, she wondered. How could it be that the simple act of having a child did this to you? Had every birth in the world ruined every woman in the world? Was this a secret they’d been keeping, or had she just not been listening? Underneath all the vacuous, cruel wisdom the women who saw her in her late stages of pregnancy imparted to her, most of which had to do with banking sleep or measuring every precious moment because it all goes so fast, were they really telling her to mark her personhood? The other women in her prenatal yoga class had kept up an email chain, and in their messages, she tried to discern that they, too, were terrified and violated and sad and broken, but they weren’t. Trust her, they just weren’t. They made jokes about how they were tired and it was a tragedy that one of them had had an epidural and it was a tragedy that one of them couldn’t produce enough milk for her baby and had to supplement with formula. She wanted to write back to tell them she couldn’t look in the mirror at herself. She wanted someone to understand how small she was now. She wanted to ask one of them if this was the real her—if the real her had been revealed to her suddenly that day in the hospital, or if she would somehow bounce back. Bouncing back was a language they understood: their vaginas needed to bounce back, their breasts needed to bounce back, would their abdomens ever bounce back. With a few small adjustments, these women would acclimate to life. They would recognize themselves. But would Rachel? Would Rachel bounce back? The entire phrase “bouncing back” seemed to her like it existed to make fun of her. There was no bouncing. There was no back.

That Boston show was when I began to see your mother through the eyes of her fans and realized her stage presence was more than the sum of its jokes. She was speaking to people's truths and making them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. This was what our ayahuasca ceremonies were about: sourcing the most potent parts of ourselves and letting go of the rest. Your mother, I saw, had done just that. She was embodying experiences lie pregnancy and childbirth that are sacred to us as individuals, and celebrating these acts in a fresh new light. Asian cultures often teach us to be silent about our sexuality and filled with shame. Your mother breaks that up and transmutes pain and shame into power, like a mystical priestess.

It would be Olivia who wouldn’t come home one night. Alice couldn’t stop being surprised at the transformation of Olivia from sweet, angelic little girl to surly, furious, secretive teenager. She’d dyed her beautiful blond curls black and pulled her hair dead straight, so she looked like Morticia from The Addams Family. “Who?” Olivia had sneered. You couldn’t talk to her. Anything you said was likely to give offense. The slamming of her bedroom door reverberated throughout the house on a regular basis. “I hate my life!” she would scream, and Alice would be researching teenage suicide on the Net, when next thing she’d hear her shrieking with laughter with her friends on the phone. Drugs. Teenage pregnancy. Tattoos. It all seemed possible with Olivia.

The conditions in the womb—in the intrauterine environment—influence the development of the fetus, so that subtly different conditions will lead, in effect, to the birth of newborns who respond differently to the environment they face outside the womb. In particular, the nutrients that the developing child receives in the womb—including the supply of glucose—pass across the placenta in proportion to the nutrient concentration in the mother’s circulation. The higher the mother’s blood sugar, the greater the supply of glucose to the fetus. The developing pancreas responds by overproducing insulin-secreting cells. “The baby is not diabetic,” says Boyd Metzger, who studies diabetes and pregnancy at Northwestern University, “but the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are stimulated to function and grow in size and number by the environment they’re in. So they start overfunctioning. That in turn leads to a baby laying down more fat, which is why the baby of a diabetic mother is typified by being a fat baby.

There are two kinds of genius: one which above all breeds and desires to breed, and another which is happy to let itself be fertilized and give birth. In just the same way, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the female problem of pregnancy and the secret task of shaping, maturing, and perfecting have been assigned - the Greeks, for example, were a people of this kind, like the French - and there are others who have to fertilize and become the origin of new orders of life - like the Jews, the Romans, and, one could ask in all modesty, the Germans? - People tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly driven outside themselves, in love with and lusting after foreign races (after those who "let themselves be fertilized"-) and thus obsessed with mastery, like everything which has a knowledge of itself as full of procreative power and thus "by the grace of God." These two types of genius seek each other out, like man and woman, but they also misunderstand each other - like man and woman.

We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly-spawning class of human beings who should never have been born at all.1 —Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization In 2009, Hillary Clinton came to Houston, Texas, to receive the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood. Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and the award is its highest prize. In receiving the award, Hillary said of Sanger, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. I am really in awe of her. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life and the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so greatly.”2 What was Margaret Sanger’s vision? What was the cause to which she devoted her life? Sanger is known as a champion of birth control, of providing women with the means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. But the real Margaret Sanger was very different from how she’s portrayed in Planned Parenthood brochures. The real Margaret Sanger did not want women in general to limit their pregnancies. She wanted white, wealthy, educated women to have more children, and poor, uneducated, black women to have none. “Unwanted” for Sanger didn’t mean unwanted by the mother—it meant unwanted by Sanger. Sanger’s influence contributed to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which poor blacks were deliberately injected with syphilis without their knowledge. Today the Tuskegee Project is falsely portrayed as an example of southern backwardness and American bigotry; in fact, it was a progressive scheme carried out with the very eugenic goals that Margaret Sanger herself championed. In 1926, Sanger spoke to a Women’s Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey about her solution for reducing the black birthrate. She also sponsored a Negro Project specifically designed, in her vocabulary, to get rid of “human beings who should never have been born.” In one of her letters Sanger said, “We do not want word to get out that we are trying to exterminate the Negro population.”3 The racists loved it; other KKK speaking invitations followed. Now it may seem odd that a woman with such views would be embraced by Planned Parenthood—even odder that she would be a role model for Hillary Clinton. Why would they celebrate Sanger given her racist philosophy? In

After the Fall It will not be an easy journey. Adam is condemned to a life of ‘painful toil’ with the brutal reminder ‘dust you are and to dust you will return’. According to Christian theology, their Fall is the original sin with which we are all burdened, even – indeed, especially – newborn babies, who arrive in this world as kicking, screaming proof of Eve’s curse, not to mention the very fact that their existence is the inevitable evidence of parental intercourse. Birth itself was shameful. (It was only in the 1950s that pregnancy was mentioned openly in polite society. Before that, euphemisms, such as being in ‘an interesting condition’ applied, and even then some blushes were expected.) However, in the biblical account, there is no mention that the snake is the Devil, Satan or Lucifer. He is simply a snake, apparently doing what snakes do best – tempting women. The sexual connotations may be cringingly obvious to the post-Freudian world, but they were not necessarily so blatant to our Bible-quoting ancestors. However, it is not much of a leap from the story of the wicked snake to the notion of its being instructed or even possessed by the personification of evil, whoever or whatever that might be: Milton makes the point clear in his description of ‘. . . the serpent, or rather Satan in the serpent.’30 (The identification

there was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home—but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time: from when you leave your parents' home to your first pregnancy. From that moment, from the first pregnancy, we had to begin to live our lives only around the children. Just like our mothers. Even to sweep pavements for our children, because your child is the chick and you are—what? When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats so as to grow big and strong. And when your child grows up—even then you can't go back to being yourself, you simply change from being a mother to being a grandmother, whose task is simply to help her children bring up their children. True, even then there were quite a few women who made careers for themselves and went out into the world. But everybody talked about them behind their backs: look at that selfish woman, she sits in meetings while her poor children grow up in the street and pay the price. Now it's a new world. Now at last women are given more opportunity to live lives of their own. Or is it just an illusion? Maybe in the younger generations too women still cry into their pillows at night, while their husbands are asleep, because they feel they have to make impossible choices? I don't want to be judgmental: it's not my world anymore. To make a comparison I'd have to go from door to door checking how many mothers' tears are wept every night into the pillow when husbands are asleep, and to compare the tears then with the tears now.

Around Christmas 2003, we visited Chris’s parents in Texas. I found myself exceptionally hungry, though I couldn’t figure out why. When we came back to California, I just felt something was off. Could I be…pregnant? Nah. I bought a pregnancy test just in case. Chris and I had always planned to have children, but we weren’t in a rush about it. In fact, we had only recently decided to be “a little less careful.” It was a compromise between our spontaneous impulses and our careful planning instincts, which we both shared. We figured, if it happens somewhere in the next year… I was upstairs in the house working when I decided to take a break and check things out. Wow. WOW!!! Chris happened to be home fiddling with something in the garage. I ran downstairs, holding the stick in my hand. When I got there, I held it up, waving. “Hey, babe,” he said, looking at me as if I were waving a sword. “Come here,” I said. “I have to show you something.” He came over. I showed him the stick. “Okay?” “Look!” “What is it?” “Look at this!” Obviously, he wasn’t familiar with home pregnancy tests. Maybe that’s a guy thing-given that the tests reveal either your worst nightmare or one of the most exciting events of your life. I’d wager every woman in America knows what they are and how they work. Slowly it dawned on him. “Oh my God,” he said, stunned. “Are you…?” “Yes!” We confirmed it at the doctor’s soon after. I know you’re supposed to wait something like twelve weeks before telling anyone-there’s so much that can go wrong-but we couldn’t keep that kind of secret to ourselves for more than a few days. We ended up sending packages with an ultrasound and baby booties-one pink, one blue-to our parents, telling them we had a late Christmas surprise and to call us so we could be on the phone when they opened them.

I took a shower after dinner and changed into comfortable Christmas Eve pajamas, ready to settle in for a couple of movies on the couch. I remembered all the Christmas Eves throughout my life--the dinners and wrapping presents and midnight mass at my Episcopal church. It all seemed so very long ago. Walking into the living room, I noticed a stack of beautifully wrapped rectangular boxes next to the tiny evergreen tree, which glowed with little white lights. Boxes that hadn’t been there minutes before. “What…,” I said. We’d promised we wouldn’t get each other any gifts that year. “What?” I demanded. Marlboro Man smiled, taking pleasure in the surprise. “You’re in trouble,” I said, glaring at him as I sat down on the beige Berber carpet next to the tree. “I didn’t get you anything…you told me not to.” “I know,” he said, sitting down next to me. “But I don’t really want anything…except a backhoe.” I cracked up. I didn’t even know what a backhoe was. I ran my hand over the box on the top of the stack. It was wrapped in brown paper and twine--so unadorned, so simple, I imagined that Marlboro Man could have wrapped it himself. Untying the twine, I opened the first package. Inside was a pair of boot-cut jeans. The wide navy elastic waistband was a dead giveaway: they were made especially for pregnancy. “Oh my,” I said, removing the jeans from the box and laying them out on the floor in front of me. “I love them.” “I didn’t want you to have to rig your jeans for the next few months,” Marlboro Man said. I opened the second box, and then the third. By the seventh box, I was the proud owner of a complete maternity wardrobe, which Marlboro Man and his mother had secretly assembled together over the previous couple of weeks. There were maternity jeans and leggings, maternity T-shirts and darling jackets. Maternity pajamas. Maternity sweats. I caressed each garment, smiling as I imagined the time it must have taken for them to put the whole collection together. “Thank you…,” I began. My nose stung as tears formed in my eyes. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect gift. Marlboro Man reached for my hand and pulled me over toward him. Our arms enveloped each other as they had on his porch the first time he’d professed his love for me. In the grand scheme of things, so little time had passed since that first night under the stars. But so much had changed. My parents. My belly. My wardrobe. Nothing about my life on this Christmas Eve resembled my life on that night, when I was still blissfully unaware of the brewing thunderstorm in my childhood home and was packing for Chicago…nothing except Marlboro Man, who was the only thing, amidst all the conflict and upheaval, that made any sense to me anymore. “Are you crying?” he asked. “No,” I said, my lip quivering. “Yep, you’re crying,” he said, laughing. It was something he’d gotten used to. “I’m not crying,” I said, snorting and wiping snot from my nose. “I’m not.” We didn’t watch movies that night. Instead, he picked me up and carried me to our cozy bedroom, where my tears--a mixture of happiness, melancholy, and holiday nostalgia--would disappear completely.

After the war, you adopted the girl?” “Yes. Her name is Rachel. Like me, she is an old woman now.” “And you found him, tracked him down?” “It wasn’t hard. When Rebekah’s father learned of the pregnancy, she was abruptly pulled out of boarding school and returned to Germany. She and Morton corresponded until the letters stopped getting through. It was about a year after that that the family was rounded up and sent east to the camps.

Aidha, tunaweza kupata inkishafi kutokana na asili ya miili yetu, matukio fulani ya wakati ujao yana asili yake katika ndoto za binadamu. Ndoto hizo au maono hayo ni ishara ya kile kinachokuja mbele katika maisha ya mtu; kama vile afya, ugonjwa au hatari. Ukiota kuhusu moto, hiyo ni ishara ya hasira – unatakiwa kuwa na hekima; ukiota kuhusu mimba na unajifungua, hiyo ni ishara ya kuwa katika mchakato wa kutengeneza wazo jipya – unatakiwa kushukuru; ukiota unaruka angani, hiyo ni ishara ya tumaini – unatakiwa kushukuru; ukiota kuhusu maji au kiowevu kingine chochote kile, hiyo ni ishara ya siri na wakati mwingine ni ishara ya kuwa na matatizo ya kiafya kama utaota kuhusu maji machafu – unatakiwa kuwa msiri na msafi; ukiota kuhusu ardhi, hiyo ni ishara ya huzuni – unatakiwa kuomba; na ukiota kuhusu Yesu, hiyo ni ishara ya mafanikio – unatakiwa kushukuru.

It’s been a secret the last couple of months, until we could be sure things were going well. And they are, so we can tell you. Kadin and I are expecting our second child in the spring.” “What? Congratulations!” Eris exclaimed. She burst up from the table and ran around to hug Theresa and Kadin. He smiled distantly. Congratulations were dispensed all around, and even I got up to hug Theresa and Kadin, although I had only just met them. I was happy for Theresa, happy for her good news, but her pregnancy also accentuated my own emptiness.

We never have before us pure individuals, indivisible glaciers of beings, nor essences without place and without date. Not that they exist elsewhere, beyond our grasp, but because we are experiences, that is, thoughts that feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very Being they think, and which therefore do not hold under their gaze a serial space and time nor the pure idea of series, but have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity—a perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity and generality, brute essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and antinodes of the same ontological vibration. And if one were to ask what is this indecisive milieu in which we find ourselves once the distinction between fact and essence is rejected, one must answer that it is the very sphere of our life, and of our life of knowledge...It would be naïve to seek solidity in a heaven of ideas or in a ground of meaning—it is neither above nor beneath the appearances, but at their joints; it is the tie that secretly connects an experience to its variants.

In the village, women were not allowed to talk in the presence of men or eat with them. They had to hide their natural needs and conceal their pregnancies. When a new bride became pregnant, she tried to keep it a secret, though her mother-in-law would probably guess her condition from a growing appetite for pickles or pomegranate syrup. The girl had to continue working until the last day of her pregnancy without crying or complaining. When the labor pains started, the midwife would be summoned to do her job with the minimum of fuss.

They are encumbered with secret pregnancies that never come to term. There are no terms, you don’t see. They drag their swollen brains about with them everywhere; hidden in pleats and drapes and cunning pouches; and the unbearable keep kicking, kicking under the dura mater. It is no bloody wonder they have headaches. Hold them to your ear, lumpy as they are, and pale; that roar you hear is the surge of the damned unspeakable being kept back. Stone will not dilate will not stretch will not tear— it shivers. Cleaves. Moves uneasily. At its core the burgundy lava simmers, making room. There are volcanoes at the bottom of the sea. Those pretty green things swaying are their false hair. Deliver us? Ram inward the forceps of the patriarchal paradigm and your infernal medicine and bring forth the ancient offspring with their missing mouths? I think not. Not bloody likely. (20th

At one point when I was in the middle of the first season, I asked myself why I would want to watch a conservative Democrat destroy teachers’ unions and have joyless sex with a woman who looks like a very young teenager. I still had not answered the question when Claire pushed things to the next level in a scene so intensely creepy that it might count as the most revolting thing I have ever witnessed on television. A longtime member of the couple’s Secret Service security detail is dying of cancer, and Claire goes to visit him alone. On his deathbed, he reveals that he was always secretly in love with her and thought that Frank wasn’t good enough for her. Her response is almost incomprehensible in its cruelty—she mocks and taunts him for thinking he could ever attain a woman like her, and then puts her hand down his pants and begins to give him a handjob, all the while saying, in true perverse style, “This is what you wanted, right?” Surely Claire doesn’t have to emotionally destroy a man who is dying of cancer—and yet perhaps in a way she does, because she uses it as a way of convincing herself that Frank really is the right man for her. Not only could an average, hardworking, sentimental man never satisfy her, but she would destroy him. By contrast, Frank not only can take her abuse, but actively thrives on it, as she does on his. Few images of marriage as a true partnership of equals are as convincing as this constant power struggle between two perverse creeps. Claire is not the first wife in the “high-quality TV drama” genre to administer a humiliating handjob. In fact, she is not even the first wife to administer a humiliating handjob to a man who is dying of cancer. That distinction belongs to Skyler White of Breaking Bad, who does the honors in the show’s pilot. It is intended as a birthday treat for her husband Walt, who is presumably sexually deprived due to his wife’s advanced pregnancy, and so in contrast to Claire’s, it would count as a generous gesture if not for the fact that Skyler continues to work on her laptop the entire time, barely even acknowledging Walt’s presence in the room. In her own way, Skyler is performing her dominance just as much as Claire was with her cancer patient, but Skyler’s detachment from the act makes it somehow even creepier than Claire’s.

She was frightened, brazen, timid, wanton, appalled by herself, unrepentant. Adultery lit her from within, like the ashen mantle of a lamp, or as if an entire house of gauzy hangings and partitions were ignited but refused to be consumed and, rather, billowed and glowed, its structure incandescent. That she had courted him; that she was simultaneously proud and careless of her pregnancy; that she would sleep with him; that her father had been an inflexible family-proud minor navy deskman; that her mother had married a laundromat entrepreneur; that by both birth and marriage she was above him in the social scale; that she would take his blood-stuffed prick into the floral surfaces of her mouth; that there had been a Jew she had refound in him; that her mind in the midst of love’s throes could be as dry and straight-seeking as a man’s; that her fabric was delicate and fragile and burned with another life; that she was his slave; that he was her hired man; that she was frightened—compared to these shifting and luminous transparencies, Angela was a lump, a barrier, a boarded door. Her ignorance of the affair, though all the other couples guessed it, was the core of her maddening opacity. She did not share what had become the central issue of their lives. She was maimed, mute; and in the eggshell-painted rooms of their graceful colonial house she blundered and rasped against Piet’s taut nerves. He was so full of Foxy, so pregnant with her body and body scents and her cries and remorses and retreats and fragrant returnings, so full of their love, that his mind felt like thin ice. He begged Angela to guess, and her refusal seemed willful, and his gratitude to her for permitting herself to be deceived turned, as his secret churned in sealed darkness, to a rage that would burst forth irrationally. “Wake up!

A recent study by scientists in New Mexico counted up the tips made by lap dancers at local strip clubs and correlated this with the menstrual cycles of the dancers.31 During peak fertility, dancers raked in an average of $68 an hour. When they were menstruating, they earned only about $35. In between, they averaged $52. Although these women were presumably acting in a high capacity of flirtation throughout the month, their change in fertility was broadcast to hopeful customers by changes in body odor, skin, waist-to-hip ratio, and likely their own confidence as well. Interestingly, strippers on birth control did not show any clear peak in performance, and earned only a monthly average of $37 per hour (versus an average of $53 per hour for strippers not on birth control). Presumably they earned less because the pill leads to hormonal changes (and cues) indicative of early pregnancy, and the dancers were thus less interesting to Casanovas in the gentlemen’s clubs.

I secretly do a pregnancy test every day. It’s always negative. I just want to be sure, seeing as this is the last try. I’m going to do a pregnancy test every single day until my period comes. If I’m still doing tests, I’ve still got something to live for. Still got hope. But it’s the hope that kills you. Every day I torture myself looking at the little window on the white tester stick, waiting and waiting. No blue line.

Tip: Go two to three levels deep find defining your niche. As an example: Yoga For women After pregnancy As you can see, now you will speak to a clearly defined audience. The same exercise you can do in any niche. Like this book is on: Marketing Digital Marketing Social Media Marketing Instagram Instagram Stories

Believe me, I'd love to remember you if I could.

10 Common Reasons for IVF Failure  In-vitro fertilization or IVF provides a means towards parenthood to couples struggling with natural pregnancy. Although IVF is a successful, safe, and effective technique some couples may struggle with multiple IVF failures. According to Dr Vandana Narula, MBBS, MD (Obstetrics & Gynaecology), a lot of factors contribute to the success or failure of IVF. The best infertility specialist in sector 43 Chandigarh advises you to not lose hope and discuss the opportunities with your doctor. 10 Common Reasons for IVF Failure The infertility & IVF specialist in Mohali gives the following common reasons for IVF failure: 1. Poor Sperm Quality The quality of sperm determines the quality of the embryo. Men with certain medical conditions including azoospermia or diabetes may procedure poor quality and quantity of sperm. This can either hamper the development of the embryo or lead to an abnormal embryo. 2. Low Anti-Mullerian Hormone (AMH) Values AMH is a hormone secreted by cells in the egg. A good level of AMH in the woman’s blood indicates good ovarian reserve. Women with low AMH values may procedure unhealthy eggs that may not be implanted. 3. Implantation Failure Implantation failure is one of the common causes of IVF failures. It is usually caused by: A non-receptive uterus lining, thin lining, or lining affected by genital tuberculosis. Prevailing immunological conditions make the uterine environment hostile for the embryos. The endometrium has an inbuilt mechanism to reject poor-quality embryos. 4. Poor Quality of Eggs and Embryos The quality of eggs plays a significant role in IVF failure. The quality of eggs is directly related to the age of a woman and her health. The human egg consists of 23 chromosomes. If any of these chromosomes are missing or arranged incorrectly, they can produce abnormal embryos. A woman’s age also plays a key role in the egg quality. With advancing age, the eggs become less healthy and are prone to genetic abnormalities. This can make it difficult for them to be fertilized by sperm and lead to abnormal embryos.

The furthest thing from my mind following this incomprehensible trauma was to feel ashamed of it, as if I had done something wrong or like I should keep it a secret. But I quickly found - both in my memory of so many of my patients' experiences, and prevalent in the research on women's feelings after pregnancy loss - that somehow shame is expected. It doesn't exactly make any sense: One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage - and that's just of the pregnancies that are known.

It was that fear, finally, that left her awake and tearless at her window late at night. She wasn’t falling behind, slipping into some sort of widow’s stupor; she was moving ahead, beyond reach. Her own daughter had suddenly made her realize it by quietly usurping her right to have a child. It was Emma’s turn to have children, but what was it her turn to do? It had taken her daughter’s pregnancy to make her realize how nearly impregnable she herself had become—impregnable in a variety of ways. Let her get a little stronger, a little older, a little more set in her ways, with a few more barricades of habit and routine, and no one would ever break in. Her ways would be her house and her garden and Rosie and one or two old friends, and Emma and the children she would have. Her delights would be conversation and concerts, the trees and the sky, her meals and her house, and perhaps a trip or two now and then to the places she liked best in the world. Such things were all very well, yet the thought that such things were going to be her life for as far ahead as she could see made her sad and restless—almost as restless as Vernon, except that her fidgets were mostly internal and seldom caused her to do anything more compulsive than twisting her rings. As she sat at the window, looking out, her sense of the wrongness of it was deep as bone. It was not just wrong to go on so, it was killing. Her energies, it seemed to her, had always flowed from a capacity for expectation, a kind of hopefulness that had persisted year after year, in defiance of all difficulties. It was hopefulness, the expectation that something nice was bound to happen to her, that got her going in the morning and brought her contentedly to bed at night. For almost fifty years some secret spring inside her had kept feeding hopefulness into her bloodstream, and she had gone through her days expectantly, always eager for surprises and always finding them. Now the stream seemed dry—probably there would be no more real surprises. Men had taken to fleeing before her, and soon her own daughter would have a child. She had always lived close to people; now, thanks to her own strength or her own particularity and the various quirks of fate, she was living at an intermediate distance from everybody, in her heart. It was wrong; she didn’t want it to go on. She was forgetting too much—soon she would be unable to remember what she was missing. Even sex, she knew, would eventually relocate itself and become an appetite of the spirit. Perhaps it had already happened, but if it hadn’t it soon would.

Also, despite the belief of population experts that uneducated women wouldn’t use birth control, these women knew very well when their own bodies were suffering from too many pregnancies and births. That’s why as prime minister, Indira Gandhi took on the controversy of creating the first national family planning program. Her early journeys in those women-only cars had taught her that ordinary women would use it, even if in secret, and literacy had little to do with it.

The double standard is still very much a part of our cultural psyche. It is still tolerated within institutions and families and ultimately damages generations of men and women alike. These women were made to carry the full emotional weight of circumstances that were the inevitable consequence of a society that denied teenage sexuality, failed to hold young men equally responsible, withheld sex education and birth control from unmarried women, allowed few options if pregnancy occurred, and considered unmarried women unfit to be mothers. Asking the women to keep their secret and deny their child may have worked out well for others, but not for many of the mothers. Their experience and their motherhood have been silenced and denied for too long. (Page 300)

The most sordid posts—the confessions of secret pregnancies, the trysts with the tennis pro, the confidential polls comparing net worth—were highlighted in the “most popular” column on the right side of the screen, but Heather had been digging through the weeds—the less scandalous “I found a hair in my gnocchi at Sfoglia” nonsense

This stratification of Judaism is confusing, so I'll explain it as it relates to bacon. In Judaism the major players are: Reformed eat bacon and love it; Conservative- eat bacon only in diners; Orthodox-never touch bacon but secretly wonder what it tastes like; Ultra Orthodox--no way, feh, it's treif, and Chassidic-what is this bacon of which you speak?

I had often fantasized about a forced hiatus where I could catch up on the classics and while away the hours. But the dark secret about this fantasy is that you only end up on a forced hiatus if something bad is happening to you.

you first visualize how much you want to eat and then start with half the amount. The trick is to eat it in double the time you typically take. It means smaller morsels of food enter the stomach, thus improving the micronutrient assimilation and insulin response. This process can be repeated if required, but the key is to be without gadgets during meal times. This was one of Kareena’s well-kept secrets (when she says she eats everything), till she shared it on our fb live chat. This

A growth hormone is secreted from your baby's brain every time you lovingly touch and nurture her, boosting her physical, mental & neurological development

But her first instincts had been right. He was a good husband, a wonderful father and stepfather. He brought her a cup of tea in bed every morning and rubbed her feet at night when she was tired. And they’d made beautiful children together, she thought fondly, as she put Jacob’s breakfast on the high chair in front of him. Both their sons were a perfect blend of the two of them, with ruddy chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Only Emily looked like she didn’t belong. She was growing more like her biological father with every passing year. As she stirred the lumps out of Jacob’s cereal, Maddie felt an unexpected rush of tears. She blinked them back, cursing the pregnancy hormones that left her so vulnerable. Emily’s father, Benjamin, had been her first boyfriend, a veterinary student in his final year at the same college as she when they’d met. Quiet and painfully shy, Maddie had always found it hard to make friends, having been raised by a widowed mother too busy with her charitable causes to have time to show Maddie how to have fun. At twenty-one, she’d never even been on a date until Benjamin asked her to join him at a lecture about animal husbandry. Somehow, Benjamin had got under her skin. Theirs had been a gentle, low-key relationship, a slow burn born of shared interests and companionship. It wasn’t love, exactly, but it was warm and reassuring and safe. Eight months after they’d met, she’d lost her virginity to him in an encounter that, like the relationship itself, was unremarkable but quietly satisfying. The pregnancy a year later had been a complete accident. To her surprise, Benjamin had been thrilled. They’d both graduated college by then, and while she made next to nothing at the sanctuary, he was earning enough as a small animal vet to look after them both. He bought dozens of books on fatherhood and had picked out names – Emily for a girl, Charlie for a boy – before Maddie had been for her first scan. He was so excited about becoming a

The Hope family murders. Lenora’s pregnancy. Mary’s death. They’re all tied together in a complex knot of secrets, lies, and misdeeds both past and present. I’m certain that if I can unravel it, the truth will be revealed. About Carter and Mary, yes, but most of all about Lenora. She’s the person I need to understand the most.