The Green Room

Things I am looking forward to doing once I am no longer pregnant:

-Flopping down on the bed. Or on a chair. Or generally making any kind of sudden, unsupported movement.
-Wearing clothes with non-stretchy waistbands.
-Breathing without pain or difficulty.
-Having a glass of Scotch, neat.
-Hopefully, being able to hear again. (My doctor promises me that my ears and my nose should stop feeling so stuffed up after the baby is born. I really hope she’s right.)
-Being able to reach my feet and pick things up off the floor.

I would add ’sleeping comfortably’ to this list, but then I’ll have a baby to look after, and who am I kidding if I think I’m ever going to sleep again?

We had a doctor’s appointment last night (they’re every two weeks now) and I am very pleased to report that I have started gaining weight again, so I think this ‘relaxing’ thing might actually be working. The baby has also been head-down at the last two appointments, and the doctor thinks it extremely unlikely that it will go to all the trouble of sitting up at this point, so that’s another piece of good news. My google homepage is counting down to my due date, and there are only 48 days left, thank goodness. (Not that there’s any guarantee when it will actually arrive, and statistically speaking first babies tend towards being late rather than early, but whatever, it’s a light at the end of the tunnel and I’m clinging to it. I am so done with being pregnant.)

I am hereby taking today off from life.

I finally figured out at childbirth class last night something that’s been bothering me about the way a lot of people talk about pregnancy. It has to do with the idea of support. The instructor was talking about it a lot, about how important it was for dads to be supporting moms through labor, and I kept getting more and more annoyed. I know that due to the nature of human physiology, I have to bear the lion’s share of the physical and hormonal burdens of pregnancy, but being pregnant is not something that I am doing and Ryan has to help out with. Being pregnant and having a baby is something we are doing together. When we decided to get married, we resolved that this was going to be an equal partnership, or it wasn’t worth doing, and having a baby is exactly the same. Either we’re in this together, completely and equally, or something is very wrong. Having to listen to all this talk about me being supported makes me feel so alone, like I’m having a baby all by myself, which is not what I want to be doing at all. And before anybody gets the wrong idea, this is not in any way meant to be a criticism of Ryan or his behavior or attitude, but a criticism of a lot of the pregnancy books I’ve been reading, and the way in which a lot of people I’ve encountered seem to talk about pregnancy. And yes, if my situation were different this might not bother me at all. If I really were having a baby on my own, I probably would be wanting someone to support me. But I’m not on my own, and I’m not leading while he follows, this is a partnership and we are doing this together, side by side. Sigh. I suppose I’m pretty lucky to be able to make these kinds of complaints. It probably seems silly, I know my mother would say I’m just worrying about semantics again and I should go worry about something real, but words represent ideas and attitudes, and they shape the way we look at the world, and it’s important to me to try to get them right. And right now, in this situation, I don’t want support, I want a partner, and I’m very, very thankful that that’s what I’ve got.

Google Reader is now presenting me the news in French. Not all the news, mind you, but about half of the Google News feed now comes in in French. I’m not really sure why or how this happened, although appropriately enough it did start happening on Bastille Day. My reading comprehension is still good enough that I can get the headlines pretty easily, but it does take me awhile to get through an article. It’s kind of fun getting half my news in French, I used to read Le Monde to try to keep in practice but I haven’t done that in a long time. Now, since I don’t know how it started happening and don’t know how to stop it, I guess I have no choice but to brush up on my verb forms. Vive le Google!

I’ve been having all kinds of nightmares lately involving my horrible death, usually by stabbing or being hit by a car. I understand that this is probably just my unconscious’s way of dealing with all of my baby-related anxiety, but I wish it would find a different way to cope. I need my sleep.

We went to our first childbirth class up at the hospital the other night. I was pleasantly surprised by the instructor, because I expected somebody employed by the hospital to want to talk about pain medications and all kinds of fancy medical things, and she said we’ll talk about medication options eventually, but her focus is on encouraging women to get through labor with as little intervention as possible, so she wants to talk about breathing and different labor positions, which makes me very happy. What did not make me happy though was when we started watching some of the videos of women in labor. The expressions on their faces made feel like throwing up, and I almost started crying. When the lights came back on and I sneaked a look around the room, I was somewhat relieved to see that I wasn’t the only woman looking like she was going to be sick, but I still can’t help feeling that I would have been better off not seeing some of that. I think once I get there, I won’t be able to think about it anymore and I’ll just find a way to put my head down and get through it, and I do think that talking about it beforehand is helpful, so I have some idea of what to expect in the different stages of labor, but I don’t need to see it. I have a graphic enough imagination already, thank you very much. The class isn’t just for me though, and I know Ryan has been watching birth videos on youtube on his own, so maybe it’ll help him get ready, which is also good and important. But if I’m going to have to experience childbirth, I think it’s too much to ask to expect me to watch it as well. The view from up here is bad enough already.

In the continuing saga of Colton Harris-Moore, his mother’s attitude continues to be the high point of an already colorful story:

“Colt is not to be flying a single engine-plane,” she insisted, saying she was worried about engine failure. “When I heard that, that just upset me. The rules are, he carries a parachute with him and he takes two-engine planes. Tell him he needs to call me.”

It’s supposed to be 97 degrees on Thursday. I think I’m going to cry.

You know you’re an introvert when…the thought of having a baby is much less stressful than the thought of having a baby shower.