America's favorite "Mommies," Caryl Kristensen and Marilyn Kentz, have a lot to say about motherhood as stand-up comics, TV personalities and authors of The Mother Load: When Your Life's On Spin Cycle and You Just Can't Get the Lid Up! (Cliff Street Books, 1998). Though their children are now teenagers and beyond, the Mommies remember their birth experiences as though they happened yesterday. Like many women, childbirth left them with powerful memories – many of which were not funny at the time, but are now a part of their collective humor.

"Childbirth is something worth remembering because once you forget, you get pregnant again," says Kristensen.

Caryl Kristensen's Pregnancy
Kristensen got pregnant at age 21 after only two months of marriage, and spent her first pregnancy on her knees.

"I vomited for seven months – it was horrible," she remembers. "It was so horrible that my husband gave me knee pads for Christmas that year."

She avoided certain things that were sure to cause her to throw up: Gloria Vanderbilt perfume, feeling cold and the color red, for example. She and her husband, Len, a contractor, taped towels to the dashboard of their new red VW Rabbit so she wouldn't get sick in the car, but that didn't help her one fine day at the bank.

"I was in line at the bank, about five people deep, and I got a whiff of cologne from the man in front of me," she says. "Nausea came over me – when that wave of nausea comes, there's no stopping it – and I threw up on the man's shoes. He thought I was drunk."

Feeling sick physically, Kristensen had a tough time emotionally as well. Trying to come to grips with motherhood so soon into her marriage was a challenge, and so was looking in the mirror. She felt like a "cow," and began to resent other pregnant women. "When it comes to beautiful pregnant women, I am bitter," she says. "They're like glowing summer fruits. The cows like me graze through the kitchen and do desperate things, like when I decided in my seventh month that I should be a redhead – with a perm!"

D-Day
When it was finally time to deliver – three weeks before her due date and 35 pounds heavier – Kristensen was ready for her ordeal to end, and she was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen as easily as possible.

"I was eating a big bowl of Cheerios and then I sneezed," she recalls. "[The baby] kicked so hard that my water broke!"

At the hospital, labor didn't go very well. Kristensen told the anesthesiologist, "I'll do any drug you give me!" Her epidural "was better than the sex that got me there."

It turned out that Kristensen's baby was breech, with his hands up over his ears, and she had a Cesarean delivery. "I wasn't afraid of it – I wanted that baby out!" she says. Her second pregnancy and delivery were equally difficult. A 50-pound weight gain and a 9 1/2-pound baby contributed, but on D-day, Kristensen tried hard for a vaginal birth after Cesarean (VBAC).

"I tried for hours, but he had a big head!" she says. "He had cord problems – he was taking the cord out with him." So she had her second Cesarean, but says she is fine with the way her deliveries went. "I have no issues about it."

Breastfeeding
Kristensen breastfed both of her sons for a year. "They went from breast to cup," she says. But it wasn't always easy.

"That first day your milk lets down – the first three days – nobody can tell you what it will be like," she says. "I was wrapping receiving blankets around my chest; it hurt so bad. It took about two months to get into it – I got mastitis a lot."

But the struggle was worth it. "I loved breastfeeding," she says. "I had such a great time. The reason it exists is so that you stop what you're doing and be with your child."

Working and Mothering
Kristensen's career evolved throughout the course of motherhood. While her kids were babies, she worked as a graphic designer. In order to spend time with her children, she devised a schedule to fit their needs.

"I worked in the afternoon when he (my first son) napped. When my second son was born, I did graphics out of the house. When they got a little older, I worked 16 hours a week. When they were 3 and 6, I took my first drama class. In 1990, [Marilyn and I] started doing comedy. We wrote a comedy show and women ate it up. They wanted to hear about our lives – women over the edge who wanted to hear about their own lives." Leaving her kids to travel was the hardest part about becoming "a star," though she never thought about it that way.

"When it's happening, you can't take it all in," she says. "We made the pilot (for "The Mommies") and saw it as being on this big adventure. It was never about being stars." Above all, Kristensen stresses that each woman is unique and should enjoy her children as much as she can. "You shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes. If your heart is in the right place, you're on the right track."

Marilyn Kentz's Pregnancy
Kentz's journey into motherhood encompassed two marriages, a 24-year-old son, a 13-year-old daughter and two 20-something stepchildren. Upon discovering she was pregnant for the first time at age 26, she felt "so happy about it. I was so blessed. I was having very irregular periods, so I thought it was a miracle."

Her first husband was in a band and she was working as a tap-dancing cigar (she wore a cigar costume over her large belly). "My son has great rhythm – he enjoys the drums," she says.

After a divorce and remarriage, life in a house full of males in suburbia – and seeing the "plump little drooling toddlers" of her neighbors – made her yearn for a daughter of her own. She persuaded her second husband, Richard, to undergo a vasectomy reversal.

"What is it with men and pain in their crotch anyway?" Marilyn writes in The Mother Load. "They're so sensitive. We women have been peeked at, poked at and probed for centuries. He just couldn't bear anything made of steel coming near his little tender unit. I said, 'Honey, they're just going to snip a little tiny piece of your wiring out of your little tiny scrotum. It's not like some wet, squirmy, 8-pound, 6-ounce bulging thing is going to slowly work its way out of your personal area."

After a successful reversal, Kentz was on a pregnancy mission. It didn't take long to conceive her daughter, Marcy, whom she calls "a blessing." During the pregnancy, Marilyn suffered from edema -- her legs and arms were "sausages" and she gained 50 pounds. That's when she turned to her neighbor, who also was pregnant, for advice.

The Delivery Her neighbor recommended an herb in order to stimulate labor. "I took a little bit, then more, then more, and felt my water break," she says. "It was El Nino, it was warm and wet, it was a tsunami."

Marcy's birth was a natural delivery. The counting method of pushing through contractions helped Kentz keep it together. "You'd count to five during a contraction and talk yourself through it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, OK – we can all have an ice chip."

She pushed for "no more than 20 minutes," and her biggest fear was that she would "defecate on the delivery table. But I just let it go; I just pushed."

She audiotaped her delivery so she could hear it later: "It was the sound of a musky animal whose body was caught in a trap. They were very primal sounds."

After delivery, Kentz discovered a nasty surprise. "Hemorrhoids – that nice cluster you get that no one tells you about."

Breastfeeding and Beyond
Kentz breastfed her children for about 11 months each. "I loved nursing," she says. "I would look at them and coo. I loved their hands, dimples and the folds of their wrists."

Becoming a mother unleashed in her a whole new wave of emotions. "It's like when you're first in love – I felt that way with my baby; that tenderness," she says. "I don't know if I was as nurturing to others until I had the baby. I've been tested in my life and seen the true mother love."