I found out I was pregnant three months after moving to the United States.
Three months.
I was still figuring out which grocery store I liked, still getting used to driving everywhere for things that in Sydney would’ve been a 12-minute walk and a coffee stop, nothing felt fully familiar yet..
And then: a positive test.
Unexpected, but completely wanted. One of those moments where shock and joy arrive at the exact same time and your brain can’t decide whether to laugh, cry, or immediately Google prenatal vitamins.
So naturally, I did all three.
My husband, meanwhile, was ready to announce it to the world almost immediately. I was still sitting there processing the fact that I was pregnant in a country that didn’t fully feel like mine yet, and he was already mentally designing the baby announcement.
That honestly sums us up pretty well.
This isn’t a guide or a list of tips. It’s just my experience. The version that exists somewhere between gratitude and overwhelm. The version people don’t always post because it doesn’t fit neatly into a pastel Instagram carousel.
A Big Change on Top of a Big Change
Before I even got pregnant, I was already adjusting to a completely new life.
I had just moved from Sydney, a city that feels alive all the time. People walking everywhere, cafés full at random hours, ferries moving across the harbor constantly. Then suddenly, I was in a quieter Midwest city where life moved differently. Slower. More spread out. Less accidental.
It wasn’t bad. It just felt unfamiliar.
I missed walking places. I missed hearing life around me all the time. I even missed public transport, which feels deeply offensive to admit considering how much I used to complain about it.
Different takes time.
And then pregnancy arrived right in the middle of that adjustment period, like life saying, “While we’re here, let’s also make everything emotionally and hormonally confusing.”
Learning a New Place While Becoming Someone New
At the beginning of my pregnancy, it felt less like glowing motherhood and more like my body quietly staging a protest.
The nausea came out of nowhere and stayed longer than invited. Food aversions turned cooking, one of my favorite things, into a daily betrayal. Foods I loved suddenly felt personally offensive. The smell of eggs? Criminal. Chicken? Suspicious. Opening the refrigerator some days felt like participating in a hostile activity.
My husband is a chef, which sounds ideal until pregnancy suddenly decides garlic is unacceptable and your safe foods rotate weekly with absolutely no warning. He kept trying to adapt meals around whatever I could tolerate that particular day, which I appreciated deeply, even while dramatically rejecting things five minutes later.
And all of this was happening while I was still adapting to a new country, a new routine, a new life. No close friends nearby. No family down the street. No familiar version of normal to return to.
I kept trying to pull myself back toward gratitude because I was grateful. Truly. For the baby, for my husband, for the life we were building. I’m someone who naturally looks for the light in things, even when I’m temporarily sitting on the floor emotionally staring at the wall.
But I also think two things can be true at once.
You can feel lucky and lonely. Happy and overwhelmed. Loved and deeply homesick.
And I wish more women said that out loud.
What made that season easier was my sister-in-law. She was there for me through my entire pregnancy, checking in on me, including me, making sure I never felt completely alone in a place that still felt unfamiliar. She showed up for me constantly and made me feel welcomed during a time when I could’ve easily felt invisible. I don’t think she fully realizes how much that mattered to me.
The Medical System, Where Things Started Feeling Strange
This part is difficult to talk about because I know healthcare experiences vary so much. But mine genuinely surprised me.
Coming from different healthcare systems, I expected prenatal care to feel more personal than it did.
Instead, most appointments felt very fast. Weight. Blood pressure. Doppler. “Any symptoms?” Then, before I’d fully processed my answer: “Everything looks normal, see you next month.”
And maybe clinically things were normal for a while. But emotionally? Mentally? I didn’t feel normal at all.
I had a thousand questions constantly rotating through my head, usually at 2 a.m. after making the catastrophic mistake of Googling anything pregnancy-related. I kept wondering: Is this symptom normal? Am I overreacting? Am I underreacting? Is everyone else handling this better than I am?
Nobody really asked how I was doing beyond the checklist.
I left a lot of appointments feeling more processed than cared for.
My husband came with me to ultrasounds and appointments whenever he could, and we’d sometimes leave with completely different emotional reactions. I’d spiral quietly in the car, replaying every symptom I forgot to mention, while he tried to calm me down with, “Everything is probably okay.”
Which helped sometimes.
Other times, it irritated me mostly because the doctor had already said the exact same thing.
Still, looking back now, I think that steadiness mattered more than I realized at the time.
Understanding Insurance Deserves Its Own Survival Guide
At the same time, I was trying to understand the US insurance system, which honestly feels like a group project designed by people who hate peace.
Deductibles. In-network providers. Co-pays. Bills arriving months later like tiny financial jump scares.
And because I was already a few months pregnant when I got my insurance, I didn’t exactly have endless choices for doctors. I mostly took the person who had availability and accepted my insurance.
That part stayed with me because people talk about “choosing your provider” as if everyone is leisurely interviewing doctors while sipping tea and comparing philosophies.
Sometimes you’re just trying to get an appointment before the baby graduates high school.
When you’re new to a country and still learning how systems work, choice becomes a very relative concept.
I kept thinking about women navigating all of this in a second language, without support systems, without someone helping them decode paperwork that somehow manages to sound both overly complicated and weirdly vague at the same time.
The Email That Changed Everything
Toward the end of my pregnancy, I started feeling like something wasn’t right.
Not dramatically wrong. Nothing movie-scene obvious. Just persistent little signals from my body that I couldn’t shake.
I remember sitting in the car after one appointment wondering if I was overthinking everything or if I was being ignored. And honestly, when enough people tell you “everything is normal,” you start questioning your own instincts.
But something kept bothering me.
So eventually I wrote my doctor a very long email. Detailed. Probably slightly intense. Definitely not concise.
I explained everything I was feeling and pushed for more testing.
He ordered the tests.
I had hypothyroidism.
Late enough in pregnancy that it should’ve been caught earlier. Found only because I trusted my instincts enough to keep pushing even when I worried I sounded dramatic.
That experience changed the way I see medical care entirely. Especially as someone navigating it far from home. Advocating for yourself in a familiar system is already exhausting. Doing it while adapting to a new culture, a new language environment, and a completely different healthcare structure adds another layer people rarely talk about.
Nobody really prepares you for how necessary self-advocacy becomes. I sat with that for a long time after.
What I Want You To Take From This
If you’re pregnant in a foreign country right now, I want you to know this:
If you feel disoriented, emotional, lonely, overwhelmed, homesick, grateful, exhausted, excited, terrified, or all seven things before lunch… that makes sense.
Find your people.
Ask the extra question.
Write the email.
Trust your body.
And maybe let yourself admit when something is hard instead of trying to win the Olympics of being resilient all the time.
I think immigrant women become very good at adapting. Sometimes so good that people stop noticing how much adaptation actually costs.
Somewhere during all of this, my husband stopped feeling like the person I moved countries for and started feeling like family. Like home, in a way.
And maybe that’s part of what this whole experience taught me.
That home isn’t always a country. Sometimes it’s the people helping you build a life inside an unfamiliar place.
I’m still figuring all of this out myself. Motherhood. Identity. What it means to belong somewhere new while still carrying pieces of everywhere you’ve been before.
But I think we should talk about these things more honestly.
So this is me starting.