It’s hard enough to drink limited caffeine and still remain active and alert all day. Then you add in the high likelihood that you will have to leave work mid-presentation due to nausea especially if the meeting is between 9 am and any time of day. Next, add in the annoyance that no clothes fit “right” even if you are lucky enough to not gain weight during the first trimester. Being at the office is hard when you are trying to hide an early pregnancy.

How about customer meetings? Do you want to be at a meeting in a new building after the painting was finished the day before? Do you want to interview a candidate who happens to mention that he had been exposed to shingles recently? Do you want to travel outside the country for an important customer meeting during the first 12 weeks?

What about work “outside of work” if social gatherings are part of the role. How do you successfully socialize? Do you want to go to Vegas for meetings surrounded by smoke or at a bar or club MUST GO TO event? The worst is when you have to pretend to drink for an hour or until the bar closes. Hopefully, if it is your event, you can pick up the bill so no one notices the five ginger ales that they thought were cocktails. Also, then you can have the person that you organized the event with tell the waiters to bring you a ginger ale or a tonic every time you say "I'll have a captain and ginger” or “I’ll have a vodka and tonic.”

If it is not your event, hopefully it’s a big enough group that no one notices the bill. However, that does still require you arriving early to get the wait staff on “your team” in this game, or taking them to the side to explain once you arrive. Typically, when I was the only woman (which was quite often), others would politely say that I should order first and then everyone would focus on me and my order as the waiter or bartender waited patiently. It is a lot harder in the UK or regions where going to a bar typically means all beer and ordering a drink with liquor – all to not have them not put liquor in – would stick our regardless if you were really drinking or not.

The worst part of this is not necessarily the fake drinking or the collaboration with the wait staff or the thoughtful trickery that can be harder than closing any deal but more the annoying time between about 11:30 pm and 1:30 am. Your only goal is not socializing with that new colleague, but looking for an escape route or as I like to call it, “the sneak out or fade out”.

I was in all of these predicaments and more many times. Other people that were clearly not pregnant didn’t seem to care about any of these situations, and I was hiding my pregnancy, of course. You think to yourself, I don’t want to meet that person who has been exposed to shingles, but how can I explain that? You think, is the second-hand smoke or the paint fumes worse for my growing baby? Should I or shouldn’t I have a glass of wine and try to sip it, pretend to sip or just drink a glass, so I don’t appear anti-social or stick out at these gatherings?

When fake drinking at work gatherings, I found that the best drink was vodka with tonic or soda and lime. Always remind the bartenders to put it in a glass that they serve liquor in (they sometimes don’t think of that and why should they). I used to order captain and ginger ale but stopped when I was asked by an employee, "Is there captain in there, it looks awfully dark?" Also, drink slowly, and don't pound the drink like there is no liquor in it.

And remember, all of this just shows how multi-talented you are that you can focus on work, the people around you and all of this at once. It bodes well for all the multi-tasking you’ll have to do with a newborn.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Neal Fowler. http://www.flickr.com/photos/31878512@N06/4604606592/.