Tuesday, June 28, 2011

39 weeks

Sometime in the next three weeks, we will go from "Chris and Amy Millward: Childless Couple Who (Mostly) Sleep through the Night and Generally Do What We Want" to "Chris and Amy Millward: Inexperienced Parents and Sole People Responsible for Keeping Our Particular Baby Alive."

So yeah, I'm starting to kind of freak out. But just as frequently as I freak out, I yearn to see and hold and kiss and feed and rock our baby boy. I long to call him by his real name instead of Blaybley, our silly name for him right now.

Every time he moves, I try really hard to picture him. I imagine giving birth to him and the first time I get to touch him and hold him. I picture Chris and me just staring at him--hopefully with those special parent glasses that make weird-looking newborns look like beautiful, miraculous specimens--and examining his perfectly formed body.

I've been feeling emotional and teary for the past week or so. I think I'm feeling the gravity of what I'm about to do and wondering if I can really do it. This morning at my appointment, my midwife said something like, "I have every faith in you that you can do this. I think it's going to be a normal, boring birth." And I felt like sobbing, because that's exactly what I've been wanting to hear from her.

Toward the beginning of the pregnancy, I worried a lot that because this is my first birth, and I'm small, and I don't have a reputation for having a particularly high pain tolerance, that secretly she was thinking, "Sure, you can try to have a natural birth--but I'm basically waiting for you to fail."

Of course, I realized that was ridiculous, and as time went on, I let go of that fear and felt confident in myself and my body's ability to do this. But now--now that I'm staring down the reality that at any moment my labor could start--those fears are resurfacing. I know I should have just said to her, "I know this is crazy, but I'm worried that you don't believe I can do this." But it's hard to say those words, and I just never did. So it was such a gift that she said those words to me this morning.

One more thing, since this is already an emotional, rambling post. If you pray, I have a prayer request. There's this song that I listened to a few weeks ago, and ever since then, this little part of it has been stuck in my head: "And all of my labor seems to be in vain..." Of course, the song isn't talking about childbirth, but it's really starting to bother me that I keep finding myself singing that line, because it feeds into my fear that my labor won't progress normally. Would you pray that those lyrics (and really that entire song) would leave my mind, and that a song full of peace and reassurance and confidence would take its place? Thank you, friends. You're the best.

4 comments:

  1. We'll pray for you and that the song will be immediately deleted from radio stations, itunes, and your cd collection.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This post made me smile. I believe in you!

    ReplyDelete