pregnancy observations: 23.5 weeks
I can feel the time growing short now. Over the halfway hump, and quickly down the hill, that old deadline feeling, looking at the calendar and seeing that the third trimester arrives at the end of this month. I made a google doc called “Birth Plan / Things to Figure Out.” All that I’ve written in it so far are some musings about what to do with our dog once we go into labor, but still, even making that document feels like a big step. A birth plan. A birth. It’s really happening!
Writing that birth plan feels daunting though. I’m reluctant to write it, though I know it’s a good practice. I want to keep holding onto the expectation that I don’t know what to expect. I want to keep listening to as wide a variety of birth stories, good and bad, traumatic and calm, as I can. I want to not assume that my birth will be any certain way. Because of my anxiety, I’m no stranger to end-of-line thinking – but I feel oddly open-handed about birth. Right now at least. Maybe it’s because I know it will be difficult, surprising, and arresting. And also, I know that it will happen! It’s not something I’m trying to avoid or get out of, it’s an inevitability and it will be whatever it is. It doesn’t scare me. That feeling very certainly may change as the weeks go on and labor looms closer, it may change when labor begins and overwhelms me, but right now I mostly feel curious. I feel confident in the midwife practice I’m planning to birth with, their thoughtful approach that decidedly avoids intervention but also makes decisions based on scientific evidence and takes risk seriously. It seems to me that most of the practical things I’d put in my birth plan are things the midwives do and recommend already. So maybe what my birth plan should be is just a continued commitment to curiosity, a resolve to experience birth, no matter how it goes, without giving in to uncontrolled spiralling fear. Moments of fear, yes! But not the kind that consumes and twists all the truth out of the moment. And trust. Trust in the support of the people who have said they will support me. Trust in my body that it can make its way through something new and difficult. That’s my hope for this birth. That, and emerging alive with a healthy baby, one way or another!
And everything that comes after. As strange as pregnancy is, I’m reluctant to see it go by so quickly, mostly because I’m nervous about what is coming: infant care, parenthood. Years and years and years. There’s no way to prepare for that, no way to imagine, but I feel myself beginning to try. Labor, and then the inevitable moment when you take the baby home with you and they’re just there. That is a vast wilderness.
My body has been feeling good these days – much fewer strange symptoms nagging, and my belly, though big, still feels like a part of my body. It’s my mind that is struggling. My anxiety has reached some sort of peak. At least I hope it has! I feel like I’m balanced on a knife’s edge, so easily set off balance, spinning off into panic. So many obscure but real things to fear that feel much bigger in my mind than in reality: mercury (in light bulbs?!), fumes in the new street pavement I walk by with the dog, listeria on food, toxicplasmosis somehow being tracked into the house. And we have to test all the paint for lead!!! And of course the ever present danger of Covid, still so real and truly menacing, much more than all those rather unlikely outsized pregnancy worries. The feeling after grocery shopping that I shouldn’t have gone, that it was foolish to walk in the park at a popular time, that the quick chat with a neighbor was too close, too downwind. Eating takeout feeling worried — what if — after hearing that a place I ordered from a few weeks ago reported an employee testing positive shortly after my meal. I just remind myself again and again: the risk is never zero; you won’t do everything perfectly; resist magical thinking. Like mantras.
I don’t think I’ll sort this out or master it, I never have before! Like lots of people with anxiety and ocd, it comes in peaks and valleys, and before the pandemic and pregnancy I was doing much better for a time. Now we’re back to a peak, and I don’t think there’s a clear way down yet, certainly not before the baby comes, and after that it will become even more complicated and fixated on the tiny human I need to keep alive in the world. I’m scheduled to meet with the therapist at my midwife practice next week. How wonderful to have found a care provider for birth with an in-house mental health specialist – how affirming, when everything I’m reading (this book!) is telling me that pregnancy completely rearranges the mother’s brain and for a long time doctors and researchers either didn’t know about this or didn’t care! I will not go gently into months of wild outsized panic, so I’m seeking help. I know this is only the beginning of new knots in my mind to slowly untie.
We worked in earnest on our baby registry last weekend which felt like a good thing to check off the list. Choosing some investment items to hopefully take good care of and use for multiple babies, some boring things, some darling things, softly patterned crib sheets, a pom pom mobile with woodland creatures, tiny socks. Stroller, car seat, bibs. Baby stuff is absurdly expensive, especially if it’s made of anything other than plastic, but it also feels nice to know that these objects will become precious and a part of the landscape of our home and memory, and that once we own many of them we won’t have to buy them again. First baby is a deluge of gear! The room we’ll use for the nursery is already painted dark green, which feels like the perfect color, warm and forest-like, perfect place for sleeping and quiet rocking – the same glider I was rocked in as a baby. Two windows, lovely light. We haven’t begun to clear the room out yet. Right now it has a full size guest bed and piles of things, closet full of sewing stuff, Isaiah’s desk. I’m excited to clear it out and make it a sweet special place.
Weird that your sinuses are congested for the entire pregnancy – the things you don’t find out until you’re there!
Still not super hungry, trying to force myself to eat three meals a day plus snacks, trying to force myself to drink a lot of water. Mostly failing. So sick of cooking, and also of worrying about food. Another difficult thing with no easy escape – you have to eat every day! Multiple times! I have to muster up a lot of energy to cook anything. I often sit in my stool in the corner of the kitchen for ten minutes before starting, trying to build up my resolve.
Nine months feels like a really long time to wait for something so significant to happen, and on such pins and needles. I’ve felt so precarious lately, worried about things like pre-term labor, and the ultimate fear of stillbirth, relieved each time I feel the baby kick and notice my body feeling completely normal. Every day there is something I’m afraid of, some small twinge or sensation that makes me wonder, where the only option is “wait and see.” I emailed my midwife practice about a slightly worrisome symptom the other night and a nurse responded the next day with “call the midwife on-call if you’re still experiencing the symptom” – which made me much too aware of my body and completely unable to determine whether I was still experiencing it or not! I think I wasn’t. Laying in bed I told Isaiah “It’s so hard to be scared everyday,” and all he could say was “yes,” both of us aware that he can’t experience any of this is the same way I do, body and mind. I’m alone. The minute by minute worry is mine. If something goes wrong, or something needs addressed, it’s my account that will need to be given, my recalling what I felt and when. I’m terrified of being wrong, of either not raising the alarm about something gone amiss or raising the alarm too quickly about nothing. I have to listen to my body, but not too closely, not to the point of inventing a problem that doesn’t exist. My experience, and mine alone. It’s a lot to carry. Pregnancy is not simple, and certainly not blissful, at least not for me. 16+ more weeks of this! That’s not that many, but also when added up into days and hours it’s a lot.
I was listening to an excellent interview with Zadie Smith on the Call Your Girlfriend podcast today, and was really struck by something she said. She recently wrote a book about the Covid-19 pandemic, and she said something like: It’s what I could do. Writing is how I survive and make sense of things. It seems like sometimes people think I’m doing some noble or lofty thing by writing, but honestly it’s the only thing I can do and my way through.
(that is very much a paraphrase, but hopefully I got the gist)
Hearing that made me think about these essays. On a much smaller scale ( I am no Zadie Smith!), I think it’s the same reason that I’m writing these essays about pregnancy. Writing is my way through, the only thing I can do as the time passes over me and overwhelms me. To be alone with myself, to walk through something significant and strange, without writing is not really an option. And never has been – I began a dedicated journaling practice in high school and have maintained it ever since. I don’t know who these essays are for except for myself, my own memory and ongoingness. They are what I do. And without the writing I am so much more alone.
Sixteen weeks. That’s not very many. But it’s so strange to think about time in the framework of weeks. I’ve always been more into months. Weeks feel slower. Especially now, when there’s so little to distinguish one week from another. I cling to the passage of time. I cling to my body changing. I cling to progress, to moving closer to this baby, my little metronome. I cling to the seasons, so annoyed by the heat because it’s unrelenting and so static. When fall comes, will I feel like I’m getting somewhere? I hope so.