Soha Ali Khan, who has looked radiant throughout her pregnancy, says she will miss being pregnant. Here, she lists the nine things that had become a part of her for nine months. Over to Soha...
Soha Ali Khan (DNA; September 30, 2017)

“I know that I’ve complained a lot about this last leg of being pregnant — the aches and pains, the lack of sleep, the hormonal blitzkrieg — but I realise that I am going to miss being pregnant. Perhaps not the heartburn or the hair inexplicably growing in downy patches around my ears, but there are things that I have grown accustomed to over the past nine months.

Placenta brain as a get out of jail card: A heady hormonal hurricane really does leave you distracted and unfocused but the upside is that it’s a great excuse for slipping up. Left the keys in the door? No harm done. Forgot to boil the water before making tea? It happens!

Rolls and Somersaults: I watch my bulging belly distend and collapse marvelling at the magnitude of the engineering enterprise underway below the surface. It is an intimacy that is unreal.

Extra calories: A definite perk of being pregnant is guilt-free weight gain. You may not be eating for two, but in the third trimester you can happily chow down 500 extra calories a day.

Glow girl: I bemoan the nausea and the swelling but one symptom of pregnancy I have loved has been that of clear smooth skin. Post pregnancy, as the nausea and swelling disappear, sadly so does that glow!

Niceness: Everyone fusses over you when you’re pregnant. Total strangers smile at you (although I admit this is not exactly a new phenomenon in my life). They fetch you pillows, offer you their seat, their sandwich. Sometimes I drop things on purpose just to see people who would ordinarily never do it, bend down and pick it up for me.

Attention: Foot rubs, shoulder massages, my favourite foods being prepared, the air conditioning set to a temperature of my choice… all that is coming to an end and I will soon have to turn off my own bedside light which is tragic.

Naps: Sleep has always held a status bordering on sacred in my life. But now I don’t have to sneak off to have a snooze even if it’s just after breakfast — you can’t judge me, I’m pregnant!

Camaraderie: You know when you pose for a photograph you automatically suck in your stomach — for months now I can just hang loose and flaunt that bump — the bigger the more beautiful.

You are special: Every week Kunal and I have marveled at the growth of our miracle inside me — from two cells to the size of an apple seed, then an apple and so on until today it’s as big as a pumpkin — a pumpkin with ten fingers, ten toes and a heartbeat. Soon I will be a non-pregnant normal person again and I can’t help but feel blessed and privileged to have had this experience, to have carried this precious bundle over nine fleeting months until it was ready to embrace the world.