waiting
39 weeks and 3 days today.
About a week ago, I started to swell up, the part of pregnancy I wasn’t looking forward to — when all the tissues gather extra blood to prepare the body for the blood loss of labor. You don’t look much like yourself, Steve said, and it’s true. My face looks like I’ve been crying or I haven’t gotten much sleep. I had to take my rings off yesterday, even the rings that were pretty loose before the pregnancy. There are red indents where the rings used to be.
Five days ago I started getting pre-labor back pain. The kind that probably means the baby has dropped and is finding a good position. I’ll feel him move and I’ll feel a knife in my lower back. Lots of times I’ll pop up from a sitting position as if I just remembered that there’s something in the oven, except with a pained look on my face.
The baby made it through Christmas. As much as I want to meet him, I wasn’t ready while I was wrapping presents. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be done wrapping and the baby would come and Christmas would arrive and that’s how Jack would learn that Santa Claus is a metaphor.
When I feel this kind of pain in my back, I feel alone. Except when Steve is right there rubbing my back or asking if there’s anything he can do. But that’s a lot to ask, especially for five days straight.
The milk cartons last week had expiration dates of January 3 and that’s how I’d know that it was close. But the milk Steve bought on Saturday night has an expiration date of January 13. I hope the baby’s out by then. Now I’m hearing stories of babies who arrived six weeks late. That’s not possible, is it? Rosie was two weeks late.
I’m starting to know that the baby’s real. I can picture him now. When I was in Vermont, a friend said that it must be nice to know that I’m not alone. She said that when she was pregnant with her son away from home, she liked to picture him and talk to him. I told her that I couldn’t do that, I had no way of knowing what he looked like or what he’d be like. Forgive me for my lack of imagination. She admitted that she pictured a fair-haired boy and he came out very dark and he tans better than any of us. But now I can picture him, or picture an essence of a boy. It’s no longer just a blue thing inhaling amniotic fluid in my uterus. I can picture further than that. Maybe it’s late for us to be doing this, but Steve talked to him directly and specifically for the first time last night. He told him he could come out now. We agreed that it was a beautiful world to enter, though it could use more snow. Today there’s more snow.
Other people in our birthing class seemed to interact with the bellies more than we have. I’m sure it’s out of a hesitancy, a disbelief that this is real after all we went through to get here. The other husbands would touch their partner’s stomachs in class, or the women would rest their hand on their own stomachs. It’s been so hard to picture that Big Belly equals Cute Baby. If I can’t picture it, I don’t expect my husband to. For all his talk of our pregnancy, I’m the one who’s not drinking wine or eating raw fish. I don’t know how it can be real until the baby is here. But lately we’ve been wishing him out, luring him with our lullabies, and that makes the baby real.
Steve thinks the baby won’t come out until the new year. But over breakfast yesterday we were talking about this and that, a random breakfast conversation, when suddenly Steve bellowed, Baby, come out! out of nowhere. I think the neighbors heard him. We are in waiting mode. We didn’t like 30 Rock the first time we watched it, but we’ve been watching every single episode again. We’re halfway through the third season. All this heart work, all this waiting, we need forty minutes a day to disappear. Steve likes to watch movies that make his adrenaline race, but lately we watch mild comedies, just waiting, saving our energy. I read a book that says I should get eight hours of sleep a night in this waiting time, just in case. I don’t want to be running around for hours and then go into labor. So we rest. We’re ready. We’re playing the part of the calm before the imminent storm.
Not that we’re ready. No one can be ready. I have no idea what it will be like. There’s so much we haven’t done. I don’t know how to put an anchor into the wall to hang pictures while also measuring the art height and holding it up to see how it looks, so I haven’t put up any art in the baby’s room. We don’t have a name picked out. I have yet to polish my birth plan. There are still projects from Christmas floating around the house. We’re not ready, we’re just done waiting.
