When I was pregnant with Isaac, every day and every hour plodded by in a combination of stunning slowness and excruciating suspense. My personal goal was to make it to 28 weeks, which that time was Labor Day weekend. At my 28-week OB appointment I came in crowing, “28 weeks! My personal goal! Woo-hoo! I made it!” Dr. Philipson fixed me with a steely gaze and said sternly, “Well I want another month, so don’t get any ideas.” As if… As if I would get “ideas” and in my celebratory exuberance just WILL myself into preterm labor.
Today was my 28-week appointment once again. I tried to play it cool this time. (Same doctor, tried and true.) The baby’s heartbeat was lovely. My girth met the doctor’s expectations, so Sassy seems to be growing fine. (Lying across my pelvis as in a hammock, hip to hip.) I had to do this annoying glucose tolerance test today to make sure I’m not developing gestational diabetes, which entails drinking 12 ounces of this nasty, orange pop concentrate sort of stuff and then getting blood drawn an hour later. We talked about my jaw, which everyone had to agree was the weirdest story ever. And then towards the end of the appointment, I said, very off-handedly, “Well, 28-weeks, that’s getting pretty good!” Dr. Philipson beamed at me and said, “Are you kidding me? It’s EXCELLENT!”
Now it’s all the homestretch from here. At any point along the continuum between now and the due date (Oct 13), having the baby would not be a disaster. Each week, of course, better than the last. We can all agree that 32 would be better than 28, and 36 would be better than 32. But now we’re solidly into the realm of healthy, secure preemie. The goal now is to get BEYOND preemie, into the realm of full-term, which starts officially at 37 weeks. I’m still hoping for a massive, due date 9-pounder. Why not? I have to have a c-section anyway, assuming Sassy will continue lazing around in a transverse breech position, which is agreed upon to be unbirthable even by the most anti-western-medicine midwife who has delivered hundreds of babies in the back of a school bus. Even such a person would say, “Go and have a c-section because it can’t be done.” Or if it settles like Isaac into the upper right quadrant of my abdomen, with its little butt far away from the door. (I mean, not even standard old breech.) So, in that case, let’s make it enormous. I have nothing to lose!
I can also report that things seem to be calming down somewhat, like my body has finally acclimated to the reality of the pregnancy. I find that just doing the minor activities of daily life (getting out of a chair, walking up the stairs, etc.) is NOT causing me contractions all the time anymore. Something seems sturdier and more comfortable about the whole thing, while of course at the same time I am feeling more and more and MORE rotund. Waddle! Waddle! And of course, a heat wave. Yes. Well, I tried my hardest not to be pregnant in the summer and once again failed. Oh well! At least this time we have central air at home and I have a car with A/C. What a difference that makes…
It irritates me when someone looks giddily at her two pink lines on a home pregnancy test and immediately conflates two very different realities: “I’m pregnant.” [fact] and “We’re going to have a baby!!” [conjecture]. Well now with 28-weeks attained I feel we can finally span the divide and say to ourselves: “we’re going to have a baby.” At this point, what we’re doing is quibbling about how big, how healthy, what kind, etc. Details TBD, but the reality of the baby is now fairly secure. We can start thinking, hey, we’d better get a new dresser, and how many of those little onesies do we have left from Isaac anyway? And maybe we could get Isaac to trade us his rocking chair for this big easy chair, but if not we’ll need a new rocking chair also. … etc. It’s a different mindset, and a nicer one by far.
Meanwhile, big-brother-to-be Isaac is a knight most of the time. His armor is… how should I put it?… critical to his well being. Watching a slightly scary Disney cartoon? Must suit up in armor from head to toe and stand guard, sword drawn, until the scary part is over. Going to the grocery store? Better bring the armor, just in case there are bad guys in our world. Someone said, foolishly, to him, “You can be a knight for Halloween.” To which he replied, rather coldly, “I AM a knight.” You see, this is not a costume, nothing so childish and silly as that. He’s not playing dress up. This IS his identity. A few days ago he insisted that I adorn his armor with wings. This in addition to the pink feather boa affixed to the top of his helment mohawk style, his “crest.” (The crest replacing his “plume” — a red parrot feather that was stuck there vertically in a little hole on the top until it wore out.) He chose pale pink (surprise) construction paper and I made him a set of paper wings, a la Hermes, and attached them to his helmet on each side. Then he wanted wings on his breast plate, his sword (“But it could fly away,” I protested. “I’ll hold it real tight,” he said grimly.), on the paws of the dragon on his shield. An extra set behind the original ones on his helmet. “Now I’m Hermes Knight!” he declared. He is COVERED with wings. There was a slight misunderstanding as to whether all these wings could really make him fly, which I worked hard to clarify. Just PRETEND! (I didn’t want him jumping off things…!)
The other thing is that his pink-gun fantasy has not let up. He WANTS a pink gun so badly. His grandpa got him a pair of squirt guns, neither pink, but these did nothing to placate the young knight. He wants a pink gun, plastic, that will shoot bullets and have “fumes.” I think he’s referring to the wisp of smoke so often seen after firing a gun in comic books. Today I was reading him Kipling’s “The cat who walks by himself,” (which he loves), and he kept punctuating the story with plans: “I’ll get my toy gun, pink, and my bullet, and my fumes, and then BANG! I’ll shoot that wild animal before it hurts the baby!”
His knowledge of Greek mythology is impressive. He’s been poring over a children’s mythology book and has most of the gods and goddesses memorized. He has other myth books too (his favorite is by Akili), such that he can compare. The other day he said to me, “In this book, Hephaestus makes two maidens out of gold. But in my other book one maiden is gold and the other is STEEL!” (I think she’s really silver…) “And his other name is Vulcan! And he makes thunderbolts for Zeus!” You can have a conversation with him like, “How was Athena born?” To which he’ll say, “She sprang out of Zeus’s head! He had a bad headache and Vulcan smashed his head open with an axe and then she popped out wearing all her armor!” He’s been watching the Disney “Hercules” movie fairly constantly. It’s too scary, overall. I would not have introduced it to him, but it happened when we were on the long drive to and from South Carolina, and our friend who lent us the car TV sent the tape along with it, and we put it in in a weak moment, and it fascinated Isaac so much that once it began it was hard to stop. Hades is incredibly scary in it, and the hydra is downright terrifying. I’m not happy to hear my son saying, “I’ll just slice off their heads with my sword and burn the stumps before they grow back!” It’s… um… a little bit violent. But I guess I can accept that because it has gotten him so fixated on mythology, which I do think is a benefit. I mean, what do you learn from Bambi? Snow White? Beauty and the Beast? If he’s going to fixate on a Disney production, at least this one has a small kernel of actual worth to it.
He peppers me with questions about life and death all too often. The other day we were driving along when he suddenly announced, “If I died, you could just make another baby and so it would be fine!” Resisting the impulse to pull over and sob uncontrollably, I calmly replied, “Well, no, because even if I had another baby it wouldn’t be YOU. There’s only one you, and if you died I would be very sad. I could never replace you.”
“Why?” he wanted to know.
“Well, because, each person is the only one just like that. There’s only one you. There’s only one me. You can’t just get a new one and make it okay. Like remember when Mr. Cat died?”
“Yeah…”
“Well if we got a new cat, would it be the same as having Mr. Cat back alive and with us like nothing happened?”
“Yes!”
“No– no” I protested. “It wouldn’t. It would just be some other cat, and maybe we would love it too, but it wouldn’t be Mr. Cat himself.”
I feel that I didn’t make the uniqueness of all living things adequately clear to him, and it vexed me. But maybe he was asking me about something else entirely– maybe he was trying to ask, “When Sassy comes will I be replaced?” I think this is on his mind and a source of worry, and he’s casting about for reassurance. It’s been a hard couple months here between Isaac and me because I’ve gotten more and more limited on what I can do with him, and he’s had to adjust to being taken care of by all sorts of other people while I rest. It’s taken a toll on him that manifests itself in horrendous behavior. Last night we were out to dinner at a restaurant with some friends. I think Isaac was bothered by the fact that I was paying more attention to the friends than to him, so here’s what he did: spit at me through his straw; crush his cup of ginger ale so it drenched him; throw his chicken on the floor; bang on the table violently with crayons; get out of his chair and run around the restaurant (a casual patio bar overlooking the lake, reasonably kid friendly); come and stand beside me repeatedly head-butting my arm as hard as he could; etc. etc. etc. Ben took him into the restaurant and had a little TALK with him. Isaac came back out and returned to this same cycle of badness. Finally Ben took him home, kicking and screaming and crying.
Even though I thought that was a good consequence for the behavior, and I supported Ben’s decision to do that, (and I loved staying and talking to our friends in peace for a short time!), I still felt sort of guilty about the whole thing. I remember a New Yorker cartoon in which a child is scrawling in spray paint across the living room wall, “I NEED LOVE” and the mother is sitting there placidly saying, “He’s just trying to get attention.” Well, yes. Yes indeed. Even though most of it has to be horizontal I’ve been trying to spend as much one-on-one time with him as I can. I can read stories or talk, for instance. The other night he wanted to hide under the covers with me endlessly, hiding from daddy in our tent. It was nice under there, white and secretive, and we could catch up about all sorts of things. But after a while it got very hot and stuffy and Sassy and I would need air. This upset Isaac– I could see that he didn’t want our alone time to ever end. When Daddy came in to find us, that was all right, but when Daddy tried to join us under there he was rebuffed with a frosty, “Daddy! Don’t come in here! You’re disturbing us!”
Oh well, I suppose this is all good practice for the time, coming up soon, that I will have to juggle the needs of TWO.