So, it's been quite a while since I last posted. I can't believe I have been pregnant for half a year already. The first 8 weeks seemed to take so long. I didn't blog in those first months because I couldn't bring myself to believe I was going to have a baby and it seemed like such a sad thing to have to stop blogging if the pregnancy ended unexpectedly. I thought I would remember what it was like but in the past two days I've been flashing back to that time and I'm surprised by how many sensations and feelings I had forgotten.
This is what I remember - Every thing was new and even though Trogdor was planned, and I was extremely chuffed he turned up so quickly, I felt completely bewildered and over whelmed. For a good six months prior to trying to fall I had voraciously read every book and website I could find on the subject of pregnancy and birth (so I can tell you how relaxin works on the pelvic ligaments but don't ask me how to change a nappy) but for those first weeks I felt as though I had been given a 1970s Lonely Planet guide to some exotic location in which I had just woken up. I knew it should be familiar but nothing was quite what I had imagined it to be.
Each morning I would wake and wonder if this was the last morning I would feel well for the next nine months. Then I'd eat a mint slice from the pack I kept by the side of my bed. I remember feeling that it was such a dangerous time. Every little twinge seemed to herald doom. Going to the bathroom was fraught - each time I expected the dreaded spotting (that's blood for people who aren't familiar with menstrual euphemisms). I would wonder if I had given up alcohol soon enough. If my bag was too heavy. If the pre-natal vitamins were 'good' enough. If I could be sure the cheese on the pizza I was eating had been heated to the right temperature for the right amount of time to kill all the listeria that was no doubt festering inside it. If I would ever enjoy fish again.
Each 'main stream' book I read told me to go and get tests done to find out 'how things were going', to find out if 'something was 'wrong'' regardless of the fact that no-one could do any thing at that stage even if there were something 'wrong'.
I wanted there to be something I could 'do' to make sure the baby would be well. Of course, there are many things a woman can do to help protect her baby from harm but there's nothing any one can do to guarantee a happy or healthy child.
Those first 12 weeks became a time of letting go and acceptance. I couldn't control what was happening to my body. I couldn't make sure everything was going to be fine. There was no expert, no doctor, no piece of advise that was going to 'save' us. The best I could hope for was that I wouldn't get in the way of what was happening within me. And then a very simple thought occurred to me. It wasn't particularly deep. In some ways it wasn't even particularly helpful. It's also not something that every-one is going to accept, agree with or like. But, for what it's worth this is it - Babies are born because God wants them to be. And sometimes babies aren't born and that also fits in with His plan. We don't know why and it's possible that we'll never know. Yet every woman who accepts her pregnancy has to make peace with that knowledge and then move forward trusting that every thing will work out for the best and that, in those cases where the best still seems pretty awful, they will have the personal strength to keep going. At that point I relaxed.
Pregnancy is a strange waiting time – the 'now/not yet' period. People congratulate me but I don't feel I've done anything yet. I am becoming more assertive in my day to day life but I don't have anything to protect. My milk (well, colostrum) is starting to come in but I don't have anything to feed – unless I tried the cat but that would just be wrong and icky. It's such a short time but at the end of it an entirely new human being will arrive. A new person who is already with me but who I haven't met.
40 years in the desert. 40 days in the wilderness. 40 weeks of pregnancy. Coincidence? At least at this rate they'll be a land with milk if not honey. I can buy honey.
