The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy meets What to Expect When You're Expecting for today's professional black woman The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy is a straight-talking handbook to pregnancy with contributions by doctors and personal stories from black women and celebrity moms. Kimberly Seals-Allers offers candid advice on specific health concerns affecting black women such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, diabetes, and low birth weight, as well as information about how to get your finances in order, how to cope with embarrassing pigmentation and hair texture changes, single-parenting, maternity fashion, how to deal with demanding jobs and hormone-induced meltdowns. Hip, funny, and refreshingly frank, this book is a must-have for all mothers-to-be. The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy meets What to Expect When You're Expecting for today's professional black woman The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy is a straight-talking handbook to pregnancy with contributions by doctors and personal stories from black women and celebrity moms. Kimberly Seals-Allers offers candid advice on specific health concerns affecting black women such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, diabetes, and low birth weight, as well as information about how to get your finances in order, how to cope with embarrassing pigmentation and hair texture changes, single-parenting, maternity fashion, how to deal with demanding jobs and hormone-induced meltdowns. Hip, funny, and refreshingly frank, this book is a must-have for all mothers-to-be. Kimberly Seals-Allers is the author of The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy and The Mocha Manual to Turning Your Passion into Profit . An award-winning journalist, she has been a writer at Fortune and a senior editor at Essence , among other publications. She resides on Long Island, New York. The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy By Kimberly Allers HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2006 Kimberly Allers All right reserved. ISBN: 0060762292 Chapter One Great Expectations Preparing Yourself for the Pregnancy Journey Congratulations! If you're reading this, that means you are either already pregnant or thinking about becoming pregnant. You know, expecting. With child. In the family way. Knocked up. Or as they said back in the day, the rabbit has died. However you label it, you are set to embark on a life-changing journey that will last roughly forty weeks and will allow you entrée into the exclusive sorority of motherhood, in which delivery is the ultimate hazing ritual. But what lies between then and now, between you now and you lying on a table with your legs cocked up, sweating, aching, and pushing like a grizzly bear, is the most awesome experience known to womankind. In fact, it is an odyssey so exhilarating in its exhaustiveness, so powerfully awe-inspiring and humbling, so life-transforming, that God knew that there wasn't even a slight chance that men could do the job. They can barely manage that toilet seat situation. So here you are, a strong, beautiful black woman about to have a baby. Unfortunately, for most of us, this baby-making business has become more difficult than back in the days when our great-great-grandmamas squatted in the field, pushed out a youngin, and went back to picking cotton in the afternoon. And it's not that the baby-making formula has changed, but the "stuff" we have to deal with during pregnancy has changed. From career obligations, financial concerns, stress in the workplace, to family drama, girlfriend drama, husband or significant other drama -- we have a lot with which to contend. There are meetings, deadlines, spiritual and civic obligations, telephone check-ins on all the people who depend on you, and perhaps a robust social life. We're always on the go. We eat on the run and network on the go. For me, "downtime" is a quick visit to the bathroom. Nowadays that's when I open the mail. You probably feel the same way. It's a common problem with black women. We are the original den mothers -- always looking out for others, husbands, children, employers, family, and friends -- while somehow managing to further our career, find a meaningful relationship, and keep our spirituality intact. We give up time for ourselves, to take care of others. We push ourselves even though we're either tired or the perennial "sick and tired," hungry, or in dire need of some me time. We do the Strong Black Woman thing convinced that strength, invincibility, suffering, and self-sacrifice define us as black women. This is part of our culture and upbringing. And it hasn't gone unnoticed. From as early as the eighteenth century, researchers have commented on the dominance of women in slave communities. That notion has even led researchers to study the "carrying" role of black women as pillars in our community, serving as community workers, church mothers, and political agents of social change, to name a few roles. Even