pregnancy observations: 38 weeks
This too shall pass. Sooner rather than later. Perhaps too soon. And also not soon enough.
I haven’t packed a bag to take with me to the birth center yet, and not having done this is beginning to border on “incredibly foolish.” Plenty of women have their babies at 38 weeks and a few days, which is squarely where I am. Call my disbelief suspended! It still feels impossible that I’ll ever escape this physical state – which has grown so absurd now that I feel entirely like a parade float. How is this baby supposed to exit? What, he isn’t a permanent part of my body? You say I’ll know when I go into labor, so I inadvertently spend each day crinkling my forehead at each sensation, thinking is this it? Do I know?
I’m in a lot of pain all day long, but it’s ordinary pain. My legs cramp terribly all night. When I take walks in the evening with Isaiah, for the first half the of walk I feel excellent, like I could run and jump and dance, and for the second half I am hobbling, limping, my pelvis feeling like it’s made of badly cracked porcelain, little whimpers accidentally issuing forth. It can’t be helped. It is what it is.
It might be weird or taboo to admit this, but I haven’t loved being pregnant. I haven’t even liked it! It was worn me thin, made me feel weak and confused and alien to myself. I’m bewildered by both my body and my mind, how they’re familiar but not, misshapen and uncomfortable. I hope to be pregnant again someday because Isaiah and I hope to welcome more than one kid into our family – but goodness gracious right now I’m totally not in the mood to repeat this whole experience! Do other women feel this way? What am I supposed to feel? How is this so normal, so common and ordinary? I feel so un-normal. I feel completely flipped upside-down. As I keep telling Isaiah, literally every day, “I feel WEIRD!”
Even so, I’m doing it, and now it’s almost done. Soon I won’t be pregnant anymore. New weird things will present themselves to me, and life will not be easier. But I won’t be pregnant!!! Right now, that sounds like a relief!
No point reading any of the pregnancy books anymore – I can tell I have learned already everything that could possibly be useful to me, heard the most important things multiple times. I can’t absorb any more information. I’ve listened to so many birth stories, read so many tips and studies and whole books about what’s about to happen. I could tell you SO MUCH about how labor is supposed to go, and also about what can go wrong. Better to just let it all happen now, to let my body do whatever it will do when the time is right. And reading parenting books makes me feel between mildly and severely panicky, like being given a crazy calendar full of deadlines before you’ve even begun the job. It feels good right now to settle into quiet, to let each day just be a day, as much as I can. To relax. Watch movies. Cook lunch. Enjoy sitting beside my dog. I have so enjoyed my solitude. These are the last days my life will be like this. Even sitting here writing, I feel aware of the quiet around me, the lack of needs around me beyond my own. What a luxury, to spend an hour sitting still, writing. More awareness that my life is about to CHANGE.
I’ve been working a lot lately, trying to finish up all the loose projects before I can take “maternity leave” – whatever that means when you’re self-employed and also trying to promote a book that is coming out directly after your due date. I had this weird fantasy for a while that the baby would come quite early and all the work would just get clipped short. So I would have the excellent excuse of, “sorry, I can’t make that deadline, I’m literally in labor!” But that didn’t happen and I’m really relieved. It isn’t actually what I wanted. I wanted the satisfaction of having done what I could, finished what I started, completed a few of the open circles in my life. One by one, things are being set down, leaving me alone in the dining room with laundry to fold and a beautiful empty nursery waiting for a baby to come live in it. Deafening quiet. I’m bouncing on a diving board, about to jump off. I have no idea what is waiting for me. I could say I’m terrified and it wouldn’t be a lie – but also I am ready. I can do it. This is good.
I’m really thankful for these mini-essays I’ve been writing throughout pregnancy. I just went back and re-read a few of them. I will never be pregnant for the first time again – this is truly irreplaceable experience. As a writer, you gotta mine that for all it’s worth! Haha. It’s funny, but it’s true – I’m so grateful for having had the time to at least try to absorb each subtle shift and write it all down so I can remember. I have a terrible memory – I think that’s why I write so desperately, like it will save my life. Something extraordinary is happening, even just in the context of my own small self, even only to me. Personally, privately. It would be terrible to forget how it felt later on – not that I could entirely, but parts of it would be lost. I love details. I want to keep them, like treasures, small items in a box.
But it’s bigger than that too. What I’ve experienced this year is bigger than my own small personal self. I still can’t believe the circumstances of this year, this pregnancy being so perfectly, terribly intertwined with a pandemic that will likely, in some ways, define the rest of my adulthood, changing how we do things and see each other and make money and do work and try to survive forever. How swiftly and irreversibly things changed – myself included. This is an american story, a political story, a spiritual story, a feminine story, a millenial story, a privileged story, a personal story. There’s a perspective on things that I do feel able to claim in this moment. I feel more assertive than ever, able to say with confidence what is acceptable and what is not. I am more aware than ever of how terrible things have been. And I am more hopeful than ever about the work that must be done, because I can see it. It has a shape.
This year, amidst everything, I became a mother-to-be, and soon I’ll become a mother. There is no returning or regret. There is a lot of fear and trembling. I’ve wept even more than I imagined I would. But there is also immeasurable joy.
I’ve been thinking more and more lately about the fact that soon I will meet my son. My own child. I will know him for the rest of my life. Not only know him, he will become one I love with more-than-love. I feel teary writing that. I found that hard to absorb earlier in the pregnancy, trying so hard to hold the whole experience loosely in case something terrible happened. But it’s so close now that the reality is getting to me. There’s a person I will meet who will mean a lot to me, a new relationship I get to uncover, day by day. Like all those days as a teenager I wondered with such hope when I would meet my future husband, wondering, with vivid imagination, what that day would be like, how his voice would sound, how it would feel to be loved by him and to love him in return. I would go to the post office, thinking maybe he’s here! Such a charming, silly romantic hope for a 16-year-old to have, but it felt incredibly serious to me at the time. The held-breath of waiting, the time before that piece of your life cracks open into what it will be.
Now Isaiah is my husband. This child is ours together. I remember meeting him for the first time in the woods at pre-orientation summer camp before college began. We were walking down a dirt road, on the way to play a huge group game kind of like capture-the-flag but more complicated. He was lanky and confident and fun, happy among a group of guys, chatting with me and other girls. He was himself. I had other romantic interests in those early college days of sizing everyone up (already! hilarious!) – he was one of many. Everything was overwhelming. But the semester went on and we became friends, and then very good friends, and then more than friends, and then more than more than friends. And then he became the one who loves me, the person I can’t bear to ever lose. In so many ways, it was so much more ordinary than I expected it – falling in love, finding each other. And also so much more beautiful and romantic and true than anything my sixteen year old self imagined.
I don’t know how it will feel with our kid. Some women report not bonding right away, while some say that from the moment their baby was placed on their chest they felt their life explode into something totally new. I don’t need it to be any certain way. I’m sure there will be times that I will feel disappointed, that terrible feeling where you think, this isn’t how I was supposed to feel! A lot of my pregnancy has felt like that, the indignant child in me shouting, WHERE’S MY BLISS?! But since marriage is the most vivid and challenging form of love I’ve ever experienced, I expect motherhood to be similar – I will disappoint my son, he will disappoint me, life will not be wonderful or easy just because we love each other, but we will both become more fully ourselves because we belong to each other, surprised by the specificity of who we both are. And my biggest task will be to let him be only who he is, to let the days fill and leave us, to try to surround him with the kind of kindness I want to be surrounded with, and one day let him go.
“Our kid.” What a wild thing to type.
For now, still pregnant, not yet a mother – right on the cusp. With persistent mind fog, crippling fear of covid-19 intercepting our birth plan or worse, full of every ache and pain, very unprepared and prepared at once. I am soft and tender, extremely vulnerable. I am somewhat out of my mind. I don’t feel like myself. I hardly know what I’m writing or what it all means. I can’t remember my name or what I like to do! I’ve basically given up on cooking dinner beyond finding random things to eat and eating them. People send me emails and I can’t answer them. A very weird liminal state, somewhere between heaven and earth, life and death. I’m waiting in the wings, about to step onto the stage, where I’ll have to run and jump and shout and sing and sword-fight for two hours! Something incredibly important is about to happen! You can repeat that over and over to yourself, but you’re not there until you’re there. I hope I am strong enough to do the things that are required of me. I hope I can see my son in the first moments of his life with eyes that drink him in exactly as he is, without expectation beyond pure reality. I hope in that moment I remember who I am, and that he and I are so much the same – people who are loved, people who will love incredibly.
some nice things lately:
I made a christmas playlist and I’ve been listening to it for the past few weeks because this year’s christmas is already the weirdest ever for a lot of reasons so might as well make merry while I’m in the mood!
Isaiah and I watched the first season of Fargo which was VERY viscerally violent, but also gripping and emotional and sort of escapist in a good way. I covered my eyes a lot.
I wish I could say that I’ve been eating with perfect nutritional balance. Instead I must admit that I’m steadily working through a five-pound-bag of Sour Patch Watermelons, and that corn flakes and milk are growing a perfectly fine baby, thank you very much! Lots of scrambled eggs, lots of figuring it out. I’m doing well with hydration though, due to the motivation of logging ounces in an app. I might not be doing well but I’m doing fine!
I haven’t been reading much, except I did read Leave the World Behind in less than 24 hours and it was SO GOOD. Very much recommend.
I finally watched Waitress which is actually a perfect pregnancy movie!
Need a quilt pattern? I made one! Need a poetry book? I wrote one! Both great gifts for the holidays!