I have now officially entered the phase of pregnancy I like to call, “Have I Swallowed a Goat?” For it seems impossible that anything so seemingly soft and cuddly as a tiny baby could have this many knees, elbows, and hooves. Sassy’s position isn’t helping either. The little baseball head is lodged under my stomach—it’s like free gastric bypass surgery! Always compressing my stomach to a shadow of its former self, while also providing waves of heartburn. No matter how small a meal I eat, it’s always too big. Meanwhile, further south, the little feet tap dance on my bladder. That is, when not attempting to reach beyond my left hip bone.
All that is to say— good news! I’m 8 months pregnant and the baby is getting really huge!
Isaac was born at 36 weeks, i.e., 4 weeks from now. I only know one other person with a bicornuate uterus, and she delivered at 32 weeks, i.e., now. (Baby Ulla was in the NICU for three weeks, then came home and has done quite well). The conventional wisdom on this type of uterine anomaly is to deliver, breech, at 34-36 weeks. Often during such a c-section is the first time anyone even knows that the uterus is shaped like that (it’s rare and quite hard to diagnose otherwise.) The other conventional wisdom is that bicoruate uteri get better with repeated use. So can I make it to 39? If so, we’ll do a c-section then, which would be the first week in October. If not, well, could be later tonight or anytime in between.
One thing I can say is that lately it’s been wicked sensitive—just the slightest anything is setting off contractions. Just now this evening I was standing up making dinner and suddenly was beset by a really hard and hurty one. I had to drop everything and lie down, leaving the cooking to a somewhat frazzled Ben. But after I lay down a little while and drank a bunch of water and Gatorade, it went away. Now I feel okay again. It’s just a little… trying… to always be on orange alert around here.
A couple nights ago I was having trouble sleeping in the wee hours, found myself hot and dizzy and incredibly dehydrated somehow. (Trust me, I drink water like a camel all the time!) I was so nauseated and shaky that I really had to wonder—is this going to happen tonight? But no, lots of water and a change of venue to a cooler part of the house and I was okay again. It’s playing cat and mouse with me, or maybe just on a longish path to the finish line.
I was at the doctor the other day and was told to be LAZY. “I want you to be so lazy, all the time, that you feel uncomfortable and guilty about how lazy you are. I want you to just lie around like some LAZY PRINCESS and let everyone else do everything for you.” I like the lazy princess prescription better than actual bedrest, although we’re clearly somewhere down the road towards that.
So what could be better than doctor’s orders to be a lazy princess? Especially for me! Who loves lazin’ around and doing nothing more than I? I come from a long line of people afflicted or blessed with what we call “the dreamy gene.” This is the gene that used to cause a person who was supposed to be out threshing grain to instead lie down, chew on a stem of grass, and gaze at the clouds all afternoon. This is the gene of artistic talent on the one hand, troublesome impracticality on the other. The gene of spacing out, daydreaming, and wiling away the hours with no obvious accomplishments to show for it.
I’ve managed it better than some in my lineage, but still I am far from immune. (Isaac, for all his dynamism, does show signs of carrying it too—sometimes a glazed look overtakes his eye along with a slight smile around the corners, and it takes repeated requests, even repeated nudges, to get him to come back to the here and now.) So who could be better suited to the lazy princess directive? Handmaidens waiting on me all the time! A kept woman!
But the reality is a lot more frustrating than you would expect. It takes the strangest self- discipline to ask someone else for all these petty little needs and wants that come up throughout the day. For one thing, there’s not always a hand maiden available. For another, even if I do have a lady in waiting or a husband in waiting, he or she is usually busy. So I spend a lot of time sitting there on the couch and just wishing in vain that the stupid item I want from upstairs (my tums, or my knitting, or my magazine I’m reading) would just get up and float to me by magic. It’s often boring and frustrating.
I should say, though, that a wonderful new purchase is making it a lot easier to cope with: a MacBook and an Airport. That means that the whole house is now a wifi hotspot and wherever I am the whole world is at my fingertips! This helps so much. Just yesterday I spent a little time at a café, writing a blog entry similar to this one: but it was lost into the ether (blog city is screwing up lately, or it doesn’t like my new Mac.) Carrot cake and free internet access can really make life a lot easier around here!
In the next couple weeks I’m hiring this ante/post-partum doula to fill this niche. (A big shake-up here, as two babysitters are going back to school; the third has a new job; and Isaac is starting school himself.) She will come here and be my hands and feet for the months of September (hopefully the last month of pregnancy) and October (hopefully the first month of baby). I’m getting her for half-days. Isaac will be in school in the mornings, and then she will be here in the afternoons. And she will do everything—“mothering the mother” is the doula concept, most commonly associated with labor and delivery. In this case that translates into doing everything I need to do but can’t (Isaac chasing, laundry, meals, housework, etc.), while also running upstairs for me and getting something lame that I probably should do without.
This miracle person will be like a mixture of Mary Poppins and Alice from the Brady Bunch. So I hope! Expectations running high! I haven’t met her yet!
Ben, to his great credit, has not batted an eye at paying for all this. He worries about me so much when he's at work all day. If the doula lady lifts some of my burdens, that will also lift some of his. Lately he’s been working all day, driving all over the place, picking up groceries, making dinner and cleaning up, such that his pre-dawn to late-night schedule is grueling beyond belief. But if I do much of this the anxiety it causes is even worse! The contractions and the dread of even at this late date running into preterm labor. How wonderful it would be if someone else—not him and not me—would do this stuff.
I have much to report about Isaac— trouble with being teased for a pink shirt and his way of proving, beyond all doubt, that he is a boy; how he expects me to die when the baby comes out of my tummy and then he will simply get a new mommy, and other items. But later. My battery is almost dead, literally and figuratively.