Most of my posts revolve around my daughter, which makes sense since most of my life revolves around her too. But for the last eight months, I have also been hard at work growing a new life, and this post is dedicated to my thoughts on that topic... i.e. no cute Grace pictures this time.
The main feeling of the first 10 weeks or so of pregnancy for me were shock, disbelief and fear. While we knew it was possible, after three and a half years, I really wasn't even thinking about it from month to month. I know I spent a lot of my first ten weeks occasionally saying to Blake, "Can you believe I'm pregnant?" and even more time saying it to myself. Nobody is showing yet at that point, and since I was fortunate to have light nausea/food aversions I could get away with having frequent moments where I forgot that I was pregnant... only to come back to reality with another wave of wondering, "Really?" to myself, yet again.
But those first weeks were also full of fear. I know that miscarriages can happen, and they aren't even a super rare thing, and my heart goes out to those who have had to live through that. My son might not have been planned... but he was wanted, from the minute that I saw the positive line (and laughed :-D). As much as I wanted him, I was afraid that something would happen, and I would lose this precious gift, and go back to feelings of discontent that I had eliminated years ago. Before the positive test, we didn't even know if it was possible, so I was able to get to a point where I no longer expected it or hoped for it. But if I lost the pregnancy, I would know that it was for sure possible to get pregnant, and I know it would have been very difficult to come to terms with that.
My fears were also not entirely unfounded. In my first 12 weeks I had two different incidents where I saw red, and had to have an ultrasound to confirm everything was still okay. One of those was accompanied by a painful, cramping night's sleep, where I would have sworn that everything was going wrong and I was sure I was going to lose him. It was that bad. But thankfully, both times, he was fine, and after a few days, my body stopped scaring me in each instance.
The teens were weeks of sharing with others, and allowing them to be excited with me, as I went totally public on week 12 after I saw everything was okay, and the risks go way down.
By week 20, the shock was gone, the fear was gone, the nausea was gone, and even the surprise of others knowing was gone. I would say that weeks 20-30 are the "golden age" of pregnancy. I was far enough along to be showing, not just "extra cookies" showing, and as I just mentioned I was past a lot of the problems of the early weeks. At the same time, I knew I still had a ways to go before my due date, so I wasn't quite stressed about caring for a second child yet. My organs still had some space, so my bladder, stomach and back weren't too badly affected. All in all, I was contented pregnant, I had accepted my pregnancy, and just felt like I was just waiting for time to pass for him to arrive.
There is something about week 30. Ten weeks to the due date is still a long time, on paper. It is more than two months, but at the same time, I very much was aware of the upcoming conclusion to pregnancy at that point. I think it was around that week that my research happy self realized that it wasn't enough to read about pregnancy and labor... I had a newborn coming... and I hadn't read anything about that yet at all! So I went to the library and checked out a good twenty different books about babies that I am working through now and am starting to feel confident that I will be able to successfully care for our newborn son when he arrives.
This panicky feeling of "I am down to my final ten weeks" also came with the need to get his room ready. When I was only twenty something weeks along, it was easy to think that we had all the time in the world, but now we are driven to getting something accomplished every week towards having it ready for his arrival (though Blake constantly reminds me that we don't really need to have it done before he arrives since he won't even be using the crib for months).
I would guess that it was also somewhere around week 30 that I went from contentedly pregnant to uncomfortably pregnant. I previously mentioned the heartburn, but there is also just the fact that I have to stop eating before I want to because I feel like I run out of space. My bladder is also feeling the lack of space and I feel like I am constantly having to use the restroom (this includes at least a once a night trip). He is so much bigger that instead of cute little flickering movements, he has big movements that at best make me comment on how weird they feel or how active he is, and at worst make me feel like he is trying to break his way out of there through my stomach! Oh, and he likes to stretch out, so I feel uncomfortably poked in two different places at once.
I can add to this final segment of pregnancy that I have been feeling more Braxton Hicks. For those unfamiliar with the term, they are contractions that don't actually make progress towards labor. It is like my uterus is practicing for the main event. For some women they are painless, and they don't even notice they are happening. For whatever reason, I am not one of those women. I wouldn't say they were painful though... more just uncomfortable (sensing a theme of the thirties yet?). I feel like my normally "inflated" belly gets to a point where if it was a balloon, you would be worried it would pop because it is stretched so tight and hard.
Most women who have lived through this stage say that it is to help get you over the fear of labor, because you are just so uncomfortable, you don't care what it takes, you want the baby out and your body back. Blake and I talk often about how we both look forward to me not being pregnant, on the other hand we will have two kids... so it's a trade off. I commented this to my friend today... and she said it is way better having the child out than the end of pregnancy.
Around week 27 or so, I started looking at statistics of "if he was born now, his chance of survival would be ____." I guess it is somewhat morbid, but I think it was just another manifestation of my need to research to feel prepared. Every week, I would see how the expected time in NICU goes down, and the survival chance goes up. At my current week, if I went into pre-term labor, most doctors wouldn't even try to stop it because the newborns do so well as long as they have "baked" for this long. At 37 weeks, just three weeks from now, if he decided to make an early arrival, he wouldn't even be considered premature!
For first time moms the average gestational length is 41 and a half weeks. So, I am more likely to go past my due date than before it, but it is crazy to think that he is so close to being ready to enter the world! (And makes me antsy to get his room finished).
I have been reading copious amounts of birth stories (in addition to my baby research reading) and the number one, most common element that I have picked up on is that you never know how your birth story is going to go. There are, of course, many accounts of people whose story went how they anticipated, but for every one of those there are two or three that didn't. Women who wanted epidurals, but labored too fast to get one. Women who had intended to go without pain meds laboring too long and giving in to getting them. Women who went to the hospital too early, and had to go back home first, women who had to be induced, and many, many other variations.
I do have a birth plan, but the concreteness of it is very similar to a lesson plan. As much as in my power, I tried to follow my lesson plan for the day, but as a teacher you learn to be flexible. The kids may not have understood the math concept, so math has to take longer, so history gets cut shorter, and parts of the plan get cut or moved to the next day. But it doesn't mean that you never have a plan... you just plan as best as you can knowing that modifications made be made on the spur of the moment. In a later post, I might share what my plan is, but even so, I know that it is only a hope, and anything could happen as I live it.
P.S. To those who made it through my novella, congratulations!
P.P.S. I would like to mention that I write these blogs in the "stream of consciousness" style, with no outline ahead of time. I write to inform friends and family and to share pictures etc. but also because it is very cathartic for me to write and because I want to be able to look back and know my thoughts and feelings from that point in time. All this to say, I don't worry about length (unless I have a time constraint), I write until I feel I've come to the end of what I want to share, and never feel offended if you don't read the whole thing. I know they can be long.
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