Labour. I will be giving birth to a BABY. In approximately 7 weeks. This is seriously scary. I have no idea what my pain threshold for this will be. People say to prepare your ‘birth plan’ which basically means, what do you want to do? I have no idea what I want to do. I want to give birth to a healthy baby, but there are a million ways to do this, and you know what? You can’t make that happen, what happens: will happen. So I say, I dunno... “gas and air? And then if I just can’t take the pain, an epidural?” I pretend I know what this means for me; I do not know what this means for me.
Pain. I know what I can deal with in terms of past experience; lower back pain, skinned knees, a laser to my heart through the groin (don’t ask!). That hurt, but really… an actual CONTRACTION of your WOMB inside of your BODY. This is pain I cannot imagine, and I have no idea if I can hack it. I’ll have to hack it. And there is no going back, because this baby has got to get out somehow.
And as for if things go wrong? You can’t plan for that. It could happen, it very might well happen.
When the baby is here. If I think about this too long I freak out. I am bringing a human being into the world. The human being will always be here, always be in the house, unless we take it out. He won’t eat unless we feed him, he won’t develop unless we nurture him.
Words like “nurture”. There is a whole new language, a whole new world to understand now. Breastfeeding, nappies, sleep patterns, things to look out for… things I’ve never heard of. These seemed like babyspeak to me. It now makes more sense, but all these phrases and words I’ve heard so many times before are beginning to take shape, and now I want to talk about them. I want to understand them. I dream about them at night to the point that I wake up feeling a bit sick and even more confused.
Listening to other people’s point of view and advice. Everybody is different from me. I know from experience that Conrad and I deal with things very differently from our friends and people that we know. So I don’t really know how to take advice – I take it lightly, I keep it in mind. But really? We can only deal with things the way we’re going to deal with things. We are strong, it will be fine. But advice is almost useless. Particularly because all advice is different.
Regardless, I will be giving birth to a new human being in approximately 7 weeks.
