1. A thing about time
I understand that for some people a second (or fourth, or ninth, or what have you) pregnancy just flies by like signposts along the highway. This has not been my personal experience. My personal experience has been one neatly dipped and preserved in amber. Time, for me, has crawled. Time has meandered. Time has — dare I say — moseyed along with its thumbs hooked in its belt loops, pausing occasionally to remark, “Welllllp.”
I’ve known exactly, down to the week and day, how far along I am at all times. I can think of only once I didn’t, and that was on account of waking to pee from such a deeply velvet, wildly fantastical dream that I briefly forgot everything I knew about who I was. As I sat on the toilet with the facts of my life streaming back to me like the old Windows starfield screensaver, it dawned on me that I was pregnant, and thought: well, surely I must almost be done being pregnant by now. Then I remembered: nope! Been pregnant for 17 months, still got another 17 to go!
In a way this should be good, and it is. I mean, I’ve complained about the rapid forward march of time for a good solid decade now, and it’s nice to complain about the reverse for once. Plus, this is most assuredly my last time playing Host Body and I don’t wish to rush through it and then later regret that I didn’t fully take advantage of or fully appreciate, I don’t know, rolling around on the bed like the Pillsbury Doughboy trying to get my socks on.
Yet the slow pace has definitely tested me. I can’t fully relax or lean into whatever’s happening in my day-to-day; I can’t be zen; I feel too itchy in my own skin. I’ve mentioned this before but at the winter holidays I noticed I kept looking forward to the next thing coming, and then when the thing arrived feeling mildly irritated and wishing for it to end. This has more or less continued to be my general state of existence: mostly okay, but kind of annoyed. Why? Not sure. Probably has nothing to do with the fact that my internal organs have been slowly compressing themselves up inside my ribcage!
Since finding out I was pregnant I’ve conducted a regular weekly exercise wherein I’d flip my calendar forward all the way to my due date in order to gauge what vast expanse of time still stands between me and having this baby. Along the way I’d pause to acknowledge social and personal milestones: Thanksgiving; the start of the second trimester; New Year’s; the 20-week mark (halfway!); the start of the third trimester; Easter. And when I’d get to May, I’d fully stop and examine it closely like an alien artifact. May! The month before June! It sounded like fiction. May was an impossible fantasy. Like, I’d heard of May but I believed that May only happened to other people.
Now May is actually here — incredibly, it’s practically gone! — and I’m looking around, stunned. Time had moved S O S L O W L Y until now that I didn’t even realize it was actually going anywhere. I assumed I’d remain suspended in this twilight state of stasis forever.
Surprise?
No, I don’t necessarily want time to go fast again, but I’m also so glad this part is almost over. I don’t do well with temporariness. I crave arrival. I want to reach my destination before I even begin my journey. This sentiment is neither aspirational nor inspirational, but it’s also kind of true. The journey part usually sucks! You have to wait on enormous lines; you have to either pound the rest of your precious liquids in front of security like a Greek initiation or dump them out; you have to choose from an underwhelming array of terrible food options; you have to carefully fold yourself like origami into a tiny seat for unending hours as all around you children scream. Sometimes they are your children and you have to deal with them and then it sucks even more. Fuck yeah, get me to the place, already!
Even after all this time, I haven’t learned any precious lessons on patience. Even in the end, I’m still counting.
Three more weeks until I can say: Glad that’s over! Where to next?
2. A thing about being a good patient
Things may have felt slow over the last few months but I am definitely slow, now. Slow and achy. Stairs are a struggle. Walking is a literal, sciatic pain in my ass. Anything dropped on the floor by me is just assumed to be gone forever. “Drat, I lost another $100 bill!” Just kidding, the other day I stopped in the street to pick up a dime, so it’s not like crouching down is exactly beyond me. I just save the effort for only the really important stuff, like spare change, stray gummy bears, and banana bread crumbs.
I’m definitely feeling all 36 of my years this time around. I’ve also been feeling this persistent, sharp pain at the bottom right side of my ribcage since around, oh, week 20 or so. It hurts when I stand. It hurts when I sit. The only time it doesn’t hurt is when I’m lying completely horizontal, which as you can imagine I have plenty of time to do during the day between work, toddler wrangling, and burying my feelings in the backyard with a shovel.
I actually had this exact same pain during my last pregnancy, and after finding out Vera was stuck in a frank breech position I chalked it up to that — hell yeah, it’ll hurt when someone’s head is jammed up inside your torso! But this time is different; this baby’s position is different, and at some point I started wondering: what if I didn’t have to just grit my teeth and bide my time? What if… there was something… that could be done… to improve this situation sooner rather than later?
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? A pregnant woman, unwilling to continue bravely and cheerfully putting up with pregnancy-induced pains? What do I think I am, a fucking princess? I mean, probably!
Listen, I like to think I’m a good patient. I try not to take up too much time or space. I do my own research first, and I don’t ask a lot of unnecessary questions. But at my 32-week prenatal appointment I really wanted two things to happen: 1) to discuss my birth plan options, and 2) to ask my OB what I could do about this rib pain. So of course when I got there I found out she had just left to deliver a baby. The staff wanted me to see a different OB in the practice instead. I was disappointed to have to wait on the birth plan stuff, but the pain had been driving me nuts and I was determined to talk to somebody about it, so I forged ahead.
“My ribs have been hurting since around week 20,” I told this other OB. “Oh, that happens during pregnancy,” she replied. Cool, awesome, didn’t realize that could be a contributing factor!
“I was wondering if it might help to see a chiropractor for a body adjustment,” I said. “Sure, you could see a chiropractor,” she said flatly. I almost expected her to snap some gum, but she wasn’t chewing any.
“Uh, do you have an opinion on the difference between chiropractors and osteopathic doctors?” I asked, because both types of treatment had come up while I was researching, and I wanted to get the input of a professional. The professional in front of me shrugged: “They’re basically the same thing.” (Incidentally, this is not what six minutes of browsing on the internet tells me, but what do I or the internet know.)
I tried one last tack: “Okay, so do you have any recommendations about which chiropractor to start with?” She gazed at me for a beat with dead fish eyes. “Why don’t you just Yelp it?”
Listen, I know my rib pain is incredibly trivial, in the scope of things. And for all I know this lady was having a really bad day. It was a late Friday afternoon and maybe she just wanted to pick up a six of Michelob Ultra and unwind with her vibrator like the rest of us. But it also didn’t exactly make me feel great that she couldn’t be arsed to drum up one iota of sympathy or even a single generic suggestion for the duration of our brief conversation. It didn’t make me feel great that I had waited with the pain for this appointment and that I now had to wait with it even longer until I could either talk to my real doctor or figure out how to take treatment matters into my own hands. I just didn’t… feel great at all, after that encounter, and for more reasons than just feeling uncomfortable most of the time.
I’m not important. I know this. That’s one thing having a baby taught me the first go-round, from the minute we walked through those hospital doors. The beau and I may have been reeling, dangling by a thin mental rope from a high emotional cliff, but together we formed our own tiny island of shock in a vast sea of everyday ordinariness. Everyone around us was just doing their jobs, man. I was literally the bazillionth woman they had seen gripping a newborn with a look of terror on her face. Which is as it should be, in a way — if we stopped to help shoulder the burdens of everyone we meet, we’d never be able to carry our own.
And still. You may know that having a baby is a big deal to no one else but you, but the closer you get to the end, the harder it is to escape the bigness of your deal. Maybe it’s your second time, or your fourth, or your ninth, but it still feels huge and scary. Being in someone else’s hands, on someone else’s terms, is nerve-wracking. A lot of it could super go wrong (editor’s note: don’t read these links), and you try not to think about that, but there it is anyway. You feel strangely, suddenly vulnerable, like you just noticed you’re walking around wearing your insides on the out.
After that failed prenatal appointment I wasn’t upset so much about the rib pain as I was about someone who ostensibly gets paid to care just genuinely not giving a shit, directly in my face. None of us may ultimately be important, but all we want when feeling vulnerable is for the people around us to pretend we are, like just for a few minutes. Half an hour tops.
I’d love to say that after getting doctor-dissed I flounced right out of the office and found myself an amazing medical provider who listened sympathetically to my complaints before completely eliminating my rib pain forever while also somehow whitening my teeth and hydrating my skin! What actually happened is that I went to an osteopathic doctor I found through my insurance, and when nothing improved after one (expensive) session, I never went back. I may have utterly failed at proving the point that pregnancy pain can actually be helped, but at least I managed to avoid using Yelp.
Oh, and at my next appointment I did tattle on Bad OB Lady to my doctor, and she said she was passing on my comments to the head of the practice. I may be a good patient but I’m not that good.
3. A thing about my kid
I understand that older kids sometimes show an interest in the process of getting a younger sibling. They hug and kiss the belly; they ask pointed questions; they name it; they talk about what they want to do when baby brother or sister get here. Vera, on the other hand, could not care less. We tell her over and over again that she’ll be having a brother soon and that her brother is in my uterus. “Yeah,” she says obligingly, then goes back to putting crayons in her mouth. The subtext is: I know. And?
I’m guessing this kid is in for quite a reality check when the beau and I come home from the hospital with a tiny, squalling bundle of needs. But for these last few weeks, at least, she continues to retain her status as our number one favorite kookball.
The other night she started digging through her toy basket in the living room. “Where it go?” she asked, scattering stuff on the floor. “Where it go?”
“Where did what go, buddy?” I asked. She paused and looked up at me, then went back to fruitlessly sifting through her stuff. I could tell she was having a hard time finding words for it, so I tried prompting some.
“What color is it? Is it red?” I offered. She looked at me again mutely. “Is it blue? Green? Yellow?”
“Black one!” she finally exclaimed. “Where the black one go?”
By now the beau had come into the room, and he and I exchanged glances. Black? We couldn’t think of anything of hers that was black. I mean, childrens’ toys tend to stay more in the primary color spectrum and less in the funereal.
I tried another route. “Well, do you remember where you last saw it?” I asked. “Was it in the front room? Was it in the basement? Was it upstairs?” Something fired in her little neurons and she started scrambling for the staircase. But when she reached the top of the steps, instead of turning right and running into her room, she unexpectedly veered left and into ours. She beelined straight for my dresser and pointed at the bottom drawer. “In there! Black one is in there!” she told us excitedly.
That’s when it hit me: she wanted my black thong underwear.
The previous night I’d been folding laundry and she’d snatched them from the basket and clumsily pulled them on, threading both legs through the waistband while the leg holes flapped merrily at her side. Maybe I should have stopped her then, but I was too busy trying to take photographic evidence. Now she thought my thong was a fun toy I was keeping from her.
“I’m sorry, bud,” I said, rubbing her back as she wailed on the floor. “I know I let you play with them last night, but I can’t let you play with them again. They’re my underwear. I need to wear them.”
89% of my current real-time parenthood experience is me wondering how I’m going to get out of this one. What magical combination or words and actions will release the screaming demons from my child’s body? Turns out this time it was the realization that she could instead use a swim diaper in place of the thong. The really key part of the experience, in her mind, was being able to run around the house wearing something on the outside of her pants, and I can’t say I blame her.
I just hope the next kid is half as weird as she is.
