mildly neurotic

Harper came not even a week after my last post. Her full labor story can be found here. The gist of it is that I went into labor fully prepared for a quick, natural birth and I got everything but.

A couple of things happened that I wasn’t prepared for. First, my water broke before steady contractions started so I was instructed to go to the hospital earlier than I wanted. Secondly, labor lasted a long time. They say the best thing you can do for a long labor is to get rest and eat; but I wasn’t allowed to eat and sleep was hard to come by, so my labor was augmented with drugs. Lastly, I didn’t expect the c-section as a result. I knew my odds went up once I accepted drugs to help labor along but I never ever expected pre-eclampsia to set in or Harper’s heart rate to drop when I started pushing. Poor baby had a cord wrapped around her and every time I pushed, it was pulling the cord. I talked to the midwives about it at my six week postpartum appointment and it was really the fetal distress that caused me to have the c-section. Getting pre-eclampsia during labor (and even worse during surgery) didn’t help either, but they would have cut me open even without the kidney issues. (Pre-eclampsia did make recovery much harder thanks to the magnesium sulfate.)

But anyway, she’s here. And so begins this whole motherhood thing that I’m still getting the hang of. I can’t believe it’s almost been two months since her arrival and so much has changed. She’s just growing so fast that it’s hard to keep up. I wouldn’t have noticed that she’s grown so much except that everyone remarks what a big baby she is. And I would’ve just written that off as people saying things but today my friend visited and brought her baby girl that was born just 10 days after Harper, and compared to her, Harper is a big baby. She’s definitely got some chubby besides in her cheeks now and it’s very cute. She babbles now, can grab and hold things and can sit up assisted. Her development is great but it also reminds me that just last month that onesie she’s wearing had more room in it and she’s growing so fast. Really too fast for my taste.

We are almost at the end of my pregnancy. This week I turn 39 weeks which means that this baby could come any time between now and 3 weeks from now. The waiting is driving me crazy because she it could happen at any time. Have I mentioned how much I hate waiting for surprises?

When I first became pregnant, I thought I would have more to write about my pregnancy. After all, it was a new and novel experience but I never posted anything beyond the usual “we’re so excited” updates. Don’t get me wrong — I’m so excited to start this new phase in life but I’d be bullshitting you if I said that it was all great and sunny and flowers all the time.

Pregnancy is difficult. Not just physically but emotionally too. I really never knew pregnant women had it this hard and I’ve had a relatively easy pregnancy until now. I never had any morning sickness or weird food aversions, I completely dodged gestational diabetes despite being high risk, I haven’t had any crazy hormone moments, and my husband has been great throughout this whole thing.

And yet I never bothered to write about it. Why? Lots of stuff happened when I was pregnant. We went on three “babymoon” trips to Chicago, San Francisco, and Denver. It was a roller coaster of emotions where I constantly teetered between, “I can do this!” and “Shit, can I do this?” I researched drug-free births. We took hypnobirthing classes for five weeks after all our travel was done. So why didn’t I write about any of that? Who knows. Maybe because I was tired. Maybe because pregnancy was an oddly introspective time. So much so that I still haven’t completely made sense of it. I think it’s probably a combination of the two. It’s too late to write about it except in retrospect now.