Monday, April 14, 2014

No news: 40 weeks and 2 days

For lack of any other resident, yes, the cat's in the cradle.
Saturday night I thought finishing the last of my book would do it, and then Sunday night I thought that the thunderstorm would do it.  Now it's Monday morning and I know that the baby will never come, because I woke up before 9am, ate a healthy breakfast, and haven't gone back to bed yet.  I believe that my maternity-leave sleep schedule has come full circle as a sign that this is no longer a precious liminal state but simply my new lifestyle.  I will be pregnant forever.

The hippies tell me this is not the case.  "No one stays pregnant forever" and blah blah hippie blah.  Meanwhile, my pregnancy apps have taken a dark

I refreshed the app.  There is just nothing more.
turn, with one of them just going blank-- the digital-age version of "Here there be dragons"-- and another going straight from "Today's your due date" to "Oh, and now that you've passed your due date, your baby is suffocating in the womb and you're a shitty parent who needs to go to a doctor and get induced right the fuck now."  I'm surprised they didn't include a forbidding asterisk to say, "And, FYI, if you're considering a water birth, you're a shitty parent for that, too."  (If you don't keep up with natural-birth community news-- and it occurs to me that not everyone subscribes to my exact Facebook feed-- you won't have heard the tumult that resulted when ACOG, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, released a statement saying that "underwater delivery has no proven benefit to women or babies and may even pose a risk of serious health problems for the newborn."  Subsequently, I heard on FB-- grain of salt here-- that one of the ACOG members admitted that the group was partly down on water birth because it happens so much more in home births.  Drama!)
After 40 weeks?  Epic fail!

I've actually gotten to the stage where, while I'm extremely ready to get things in motion, I'm forced to confront any abiding fears about labor.  I've been pretty confident and relaxed about it up until now, mainly because I figure I have no control over the situation, it's going to hurt like a motherf*cker, and there will be 973450348 hippies in our house to help us figure it out, but the idea that the pain could start at any second is kind of alarming.  I even fantasized briefly about giving it all up to go the hospital/epidural route.

Heather, thank god, has gotten to kind of an amazing point in supporting my mood swings, now approaching them like contractions.  A recent episode of weeping over making the bed took on "Steel Magnolias" overtones: "That one was not bad at all!" and "It came on fast."  Heather just strokes my hair while I cry, then we find something else to do.  When I expressed concern over how long labor would last, she said the same thing: "Baby, we'll just take it one contraction at a time.  You can't think of the whole span of it.  We'll just get through each of them, and then you'll have the baby before you know it."

Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure this is just paranoia, but for the sake of documenting a pregnant lady's anxiety, I'll share anyway: my water might have broken.  Amy has assigned me to put on a pad and see how things look in an hour. 


2 comments:

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    1. Yes, finally! Full post later, but we had a surprise c-section yesterday afternoon. Evie is an absolute angel!

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