...except I no longer fit into pants either. They sit crumpled in a corner of our bedroom, thrown there in frustration about a week ago. I'm currently writing this blog post while M lays curled in our bed, sound asleep. Must be nice. I keep looking forward to postpartum and the time I'll finally get to sleep too, until I remember that we're having a baby.
I can't complain though. So far, I've had a very easy pregnancy, with zero morning sickness and no health scares (aside from using Google images to anxiously self-diagnose what was going on in my own ultrasound pictures, because Kaiser was taking too long to call me with test results. Yes, I'm a horrifying person, but we already knew this). Our baby moves and kicks a lot, which has generated all the feelings of wonder and amazement that everyone told me about. All the downsides happening now - the waddling, the scales reading numbers I'd never seen heretofore, the constant trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night - all fall within the standard deviation of suffering I've expected from the beginning. My friends, family, and co-workers have all been very loving and supportive, which, knowing them, isn't surprising either.
The only thing that has taken me aback is the feeling of helplessness and occasional bouts of sudden crying. Usually, when one thinks, "If only I weren't pregnant...", one ends the sentence with something like, "I would sit in a hot tub right now, while eating sushi." In contrast, my irrational pregnant mind will end the sentence with something like, "...I could prevent all the terrible things from happening in this world." M has found me lying in bed three or four times now (and for being almost 34 weeks along, I think that's pretty good), with all the lights out, sobbing my little heart out. It usually starts with something like a bad week at work, which will grow into the crushing weight of feeling like a failure in life, which will spread into overarching sadness about the terrible things that have happened to people I know, and will finally end with hopelessness about the current events I've read that day on CNN.com, the kidnapping of those poor Nigerian girls being a good example. I guess one could call it prenatal depression, but does it count if it only lasts a couple hours and ends in a pragmatic getting on with life and emptying of the dishwasher?
Maybe these little crying spells are my body's way of forcing me to slow down and consider what kind of world our baby will grow up in. They force me to reflect on the things happening around me, and the responsibility M and I will have in teaching our son how to make choices, be compassionate, pray for others, deal with things outside of his control. I could go on reflecting this way forever, letting my mind wander through the many possible life paths our children could take someday, and where we'll all end up as a family in ten or twenty years. And I will feel my eyes tearing up again and think about lying back down and staying there for another three or four hours.
And then I'll remember we still have no crib mattress and the nursery still looks like a storage closet and the popcorn ceilings need to be scraped, and I will get out of bed again and waddle my way back into life.
