See the other articles in this collection:
• Mom's Stress Guide: Babies
• Mom's Stress Guide: Toddlers and preschoolers
• Mom's Stress Guide: School-aged children
• Mom's Stress Guide: Teens and tweens

You planned your pregnancy carefully, upping your intake of folic acid, kicking your nicotine habit, and abstaining from alcohol the moment you started trying to conceive. So now that the pregnancy test has come back positive, you can just relax and enjoy the journey to motherhood, right?

Well, not exactly. If you thought there were a lot of rules associated with planning the perfect preconception, wait 'till you see the rulebook that's waiting for you, if you want to be the perfect mom-to-be.

"Mothers feel so much pressure to have the perfect pregnancy, the perfect labour, and the perfect birth, as if these things can ever be 'perfect,'" says Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? (Seal Press, 2005).

The comments start early and can be quite unrelenting, adds Mélanie Amyotte, a Wakefield, Quebec, mother of two who is currently pregnant with her third child.

"What has surprised me the most about pregnancy is how strong you have to be to endure the barrage of 'well-meaning' advice about the 'right' and 'wrong' way of doing things," she says. "I've had to deal with comments from strangers about my size (too big or too small, take your pick!), my eating habits, and my choice of a place to give birth. And I know some otherwise very self-assured women who have been reduced to tears by some stranger's comment about the width of their pelvis and their certain need for a c-section."