I feel equal parts intimidated and…relieved, maybe?

The teacher, an Asian woman with a sleeve of flower tattoos, greets me warmly, beckoning me into the room. She holds a plastic model of a pelvis in one hand and extends the other to me.

“I’m Katie,” she says. “Welcome to class. I don’t recognize your face. Is this your first time in the studio?”

I don’t know why, but my voice shakes a little when I introduce myself. Which in a way delights me, as I’m used to addressing rooms full of people. I’m out of my comfort zone here.

Not a bad thing.

I grab one of the few remaining spots toward the front of the room. Katie sets me up with “props”, as she calls them. Two foam blocks, a bolster, and a blanket.

To start class, she has us go around and introduce ourselves.

“Tell us how far along you are, if you know the gender, and how you’re feeling. Please, don’t be shy with details. We love to overshare in this class!”

I feel a swell of—of I don’t know what as the women around me introduce themselves. They talk about a lot of the things I’ve been feeling. The exhaustion, the strangeness of the whole experience.

But more than that, I notice how they talk about it all like it’s perfectly normal. Perfectly normal to be pregnant, and perfectly normal to be in love with it or not. The introductions run the gamut from a black woman named Hallie who’s had trouble sleeping to a tall woman with blue hair named Fiona, smiling as she tells us this is her fourth baby and that she’d do it all over again because she loves giving birth so much.

Relief.

That’s what I feel. A huge, overwhelming sense of relief.

I’m not alone. And I’m not making a mistake by having a baby, and I’m not any less of a woman or a mother for having the feelings I do.

“I’m Julia,” I say when it’s my turn. “I’m just shy of nine weeks. This is my first baby, and we don’t know the gender yet.” We. Me and Greyson. Sounds weird to say that. Weird and wonderful, too. “I’m feeling…all right. To be honest, the first trimester has been rough.”

The room erupts in sympathetic murmurs.

“Mine sucked,” Hallie says, nodding. “I felt sick the whole time. Not throwing up sick. Just awful sick.”

“Same here. That first trimester is all about getting through. Trust me when I say it gets better,” another woman adds as she cradles her cantaloupe-sized bump.

I feel like the room is wrapping me in a big old hug.

“Thanks.” I swallow. “I’m starting to see glimmers of the light. I’ve been having some low back pain—I sit a lot at work—but otherwise, just fighting some residual nausea.”

“We’ll be addressing that low back pain a lot throughout class,” Katie says. “It’s a very common problem throughout pregnancy.”

We move through a series of slow, deep poses that feel fucking amazing. I haven’t felt well enough to really exercise all that much, save for a long-ish walk here and there. But it’s nice to feel my body blinking awake. Stretching long-neglected muscles. Using my arms and my legs to just move through the flow, breathing deeply as I go.