So I know I'm *sortof* posting twice in one day, but in my own defence, the other post that is dated Monday the 12th was 95% written that day, and finished today. Admittedly, not much has changed from Monday to Thursday, but I just feel that life is good and I want to talk about it.
The thing that has me most excited right now is the judge ruling in the R Family's favour. Remember me talking about how she might lose her baby because the birthfather was taking them to court? Well, step one in the let's-make-this-family-eternal legal process has been completed. The birthfather can still appeal (and probably will) but still. Big step, and it gives me thrills. THRILLS I tell you!
Another thing that has occupied my mind of late is (not surprisingly) the baby (meaning my little kicker, and not the R Family's baby.) When I was going in to the one craft show on Saturday there was this woman with a little teeny adorable baby, who had a gaggle of admirers around her. He looked so cute and newborn that it really threw me when she said he was born at 2.5 lb's, and wasn't even due until the end of this month. AH! So that got me thinking. How far along would she have been, to have delivered him when he only weighed 2.5 lb's? So I looked it up on my trusty internet (the answer to all my questions, and the source of many of my concerns...haha). Do you know how far along she had to have been? Probably around 28 weeks. I'd say 29 at most.
Right now, I'm 27 weeks and 3 days along. It'd pretty much be me delivering in a week. Or less. AH again!
I don't want to deliver this baby that early. I feel reassured that he will be carried to full term, and that I don't need to worry about this. I'm NOT worried (just in case you're wondering...ha) but I feel completely engrossed by the fact that my baby *could* be born any day, and has, like, a 90% chance of survival. It makes my mind mush to consider even being a new mom 3 months from now, let alone a week. How am I going to do it? Part of me feels like it'll just be natural and exciting and another part of me feels like it'll be foreign and impossible.
Which kindof brings me to what I was really going to post on today.
Oh, as an aside, something just started to smell like McDonalds french fries, and now I want some. Gross, but true. And......now the smell is gone, but the desire for fries lingers. Curse you nose!
Sorry, sidetracked yet again.
In the past week I saw a friend of mine who I haven't seen in a little while. I love her to bits and it was fun to catch up with her. While we were talking, she asked me a question that I've been stewing over, and it wasn't even meant to stump me, but it completely has. At least, it's taken some time to formulate some semblance of an answer. Here was her question:
"What does being pregnant feel like?"
Do you think I'm crazy, or can you begin to imagine why that would be difficult to answer?
Fortunately for me, someone distracted her for a moment and I was saved from stumbling through a response that likely wouldn't have come close to saying it's felt like to be pregnant. But the question has sat in my head for days, and I think I'm going to try to answer. But first I will reword the question to:
"What does being pregnant feel like to you??"
Because I've always resolved to not be an expert on something I've experienced less than 30 times. I'm sure what I say would strike a cord with some people and be completely contradicted by others. I can only speak from my own (still very limited, not even full-term) experience.
So here we go.
The biggest feeling until lately has been surreality. I HAVE to post about my thoughts and feelings and experiences on it because it makes it a little bit more real. I'm sure it's normal to be in complete denial that your life is about to change drastically because you really have no idea what's coming, but I feel a little more entitled to denial than other people who I will call Fertile Frannies.
Infertility really makes you change the way you think about things, blessings included. In a way I feel like this can't be happening to me, like I won't experience labour and delivery and a newborn baby. I guess it's because when we were trying and then adopting, I had to admit that I wouldn't experience these things and that that was okay. I told myself that my experience would be different so often that I believed it (I mean, why wouldn't I believe it?) and I had accepted that parenthood would be different for me. Now I need to convince myself all over again that it'll be different, and I've been given 8 months to do so, rather than 3 1/2 years.
So anyway, there's the surreality.
At the same time (and completely contradicting what I just said) there's the reality. The miracle, and excitement. It feels...wonderful (closest I can come) when the baby kicks. HARD. And pushes my ribs. And makes it so I can't breathe very well. I just want to smile and smile and SMILE. I know Matthew is excited too, but I think I'm more consumed with it. I want to do EVERYthing now. I want to talk about names. I want the room in order. I want all the stuff in the room (if you people only knew how hard it is to NOT go out and buy everything!) Basically, I want everything physically here in front of me so I can rejoice in it because, hey, this is really happening! A baby is coming, and look, I have the nursery to prove it. It's a boy so I'm buying boy clothes, and hey I've had the ultrasound to prove it. There's a creature (a 'parasite' as Rachelle calls it) growing inside of me, and I (finally! haha) have the side effects to prove it.
That's another thing; the physical aspect of what it 'feels like' for me to be pregnant. I'm 6 months (almost 6 and a half!) along and all the pregnancy things I'd avoided before are starting to catch up to me. Not in a bad way, just in an, "I'm starting to FEEL pregnant" way. It's tiring (though that could partly be because of my low iron) and it's starting to hurt to lean forwards when sitting. Also, getting up when I'm sitting is a little annoying and I really appreciate being able to sit after walking for an hour. I'm uber breathless (also likely a side-effect of the low iron) and I avoid doing stairs if I don't have to. I go pee more often, and when I try to hold it in the middle of the night, it really only lasts an hour before I jump out of bed and get to the bathroom before peeing my pants. Cat naps are becoming wonderful (and increasingly frequent) things, even if I've slept in until 9am. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about sleep. Sleep is hard because my joints hurt. A lot. Mostly my lower back and legs, and sometimes I feel sharp pains in my butt. I wake up once or twice an hour to roll over, but then I can't breathe because my nose is stuffy and the clear side is now blocked by the pillow. Oh, and as for cravings, they're not nearly as desperate as what the movies led me to believe. I won't die if you don't get me dill pickles STAT, but it makes my day when Matt comes home with blueberry yogurt or cucumber.
Hmm...I think that's about it for the physical stuff though. I think I've been very blessed with a healthy, uneventful pregnancy. I'm feeling all these pregnancy things, but none of them are really that bad, not even to the point of complaining. I guess that's why I avoid telling people my aches and pains when they ask. Because, no matter how I word it (optimistically, jokingly, whatever!) they always manage to turn it around into something bad that I have every right to complain about. I don't want to complain. I think it's WONDERFUL. I love feeling pregnant. Every bit of it. Even the stuff that keeps me up at night.
It makes me giggle a little to think about the way my body is reacting to this parasite leaching off of me (haha Rachelle, you crack me up!) and to be honest, I think it's all incredible. Why would I complain? Besides, there's an end to it. Even if I had to be put on bed-rest, "this too shall pass," and it'll pass faster than a hundred other things I've experienced. And not only that, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Not only deliverance from something taxing, but the blessing of something joyous at the journey's end.
When I was 13 I had a bad back problem that caused a lot of pain. A friend of mine tried to tell me yesterday that childbirth hurt more than my back problem did, but I don't believe her...yet. I mean, she never experienced the back spasms and constant ache of an infection eating through your bone, and I've never experienced childbirth, but (dare I say it?) I'm looking forward to being able to compare the two. It's my opinion that childbirth will be the more bearable of the two. Not necessarily less painful, but more bearable, because there is a clear end to it. It'll last a limited amount of time, it'll happen with a group of people around who are trained to ease the easily identifiable source of my discomfort, and (the best part yet) there is a reward at the end for suffering such pain.
When my back started spasming (is that a real word?) for the first time, I was home alone. I had NO idea what was going on, and I was scared. I tried bending over to pick up the phone but as soon as I bent over the pain in my back intensified, I dropped the phone, and all I could do was walk around and scream in pain, clutching my back, with no-one to help. Terrifying, to say the least. It happened a number of times after that, and thankfully none of the other times was I by myself, but it was awful. I didn't know what was happening, my loved ones didn't know, DOCTORS didn't even know, for Pete's sake, and there was no light. No way to make it hurt less, or keep it from happening again. No predictability, no graph showing you when the next one was coming or when this one would be over. Sometimes it would spasm for an hour solid before finally tapering off. It was like those leg spasms that you get, but in my back and shooting down my thighs. Like the muscle was being pulled backwards from my body. O-U-C-H.
So if you ask me (right now) which I'd prefer, I'd take childbirth. Even without pain meds. Call me crazy, and maybe I'll change my mind later, but there you have it.
Am I afraid of childbirth? Yes. But I'm trying not to be, because fear will only make it worse, and I feel convinced that my body was made to handle this, that it's something I can and will get through, and that it's something I'd do again for the sake of the reward at the end. But that's just how I feel.
WOW. Can you tell I had an afternoon free to myself, to think, ponder, and write? But now you know how I feel about it all (in case you were actually wondering!) I don't think my friend would have been anticipating that long, drawn-out response to her seemingly simple question, but I just felt like writing it out. Putting it out there to the online world, to whoever would actually be curious to know my completely self-absorbed answer. I'm no expert (heaven forbid!) and I'm not even an expert of my own experience because it hasn't finished yet (thank goodness) but, in the thick of things, this is how I'm feeling. My thoughts on this crazy, roller-coaster of an experience called maternity and impending parenthood.
Oh, I forgot one big thing I feel, being pregnant with this little miracle boy.
I feel happy.
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