News flash: Pregnancy isn’t pretty. You are sick. You are gassy. And suddenly you have hair growing everywhere. That’s why you won’t find any glowing mamas-to-be rubbing their little basketball bumps on cartoonist Line Severinsen’s Instagram feed, which boasts 142,000 followers. Instead, you’ll see comically swollen hands and feet, husbands worrying about poking the baby during sex, and spot-on musings such as “The Best Thing About Choosing a Name Is Realizing How Many People You Hate.”
The Norway-based mother of Maia, 4, and Mathias, 17 months, began drawing pictures of her pregnancy problems in 2012. “It started as a personal diary. I was so excited to have the experience of carrying a child,” Severinsen tells Us Weekly. But the 33-year-old soon realized her experience was not like what she had seen on TV and in the movies.
“I had morning sickness and found it very hard to function normally around people when I was throwing up all the time,” says the illustrator. “So I grabbed my pencils and got through it with a good dose of humor!”
Severinsen’s most liked picture is a disheveled, unshaven mom pumping breast milk in a pair of postpartum mesh undies with her stretch marks on full display. She captioned the image, “Selfie after birth.”
“I think many women can identify with the pressure of taking the perfect selfie, even just after giving birth!” she tells Us.
Severinsen’s book, I’m So Pregnant: An Illustrated Look at the Ups and Downs, and Everything in Between, of Pregnancy, will be released in March and is available for presale on Amazon.