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she’s been out now longer than she was ever in.

yesterday marked sixteen months since the day i found out i was pregnant with Posey. it was an eight-month pregnancy that felt like eighty. and eight and a half months later, i think i’m finally recovered-ish. send flowers.

they say we humans have a fourth trimester to pregnancy, the final one spent outside the womb thanks to the engineering clusterfuck of large brains and tender perinea.  i say four-schmore.

i’m more of a six-trimester mammal, myself.

both times i’ve come home from the hospital with a baby, it’s taken an entire pregnancy-length again for me and the offspring to begin to show signs of being human. the colicky infant and the feeding machine who doesn’t sleep more than three hours in a row are not functioning people, people.  they are still gestating, albeit perhaps in separate beds. they are creatures of the body, days dictated by routines of demanding bellies and sheer exhaustion and a lot of mindless wiping.  of everything.

the taller of the pair may occasionally engage in conversation and give the impression of being a thinking adult, but do not be fooled.  that is not thinking. that is just the habit of talking in complete sentences, which is hard to break even when one actually has nothing to say other than “i wiped vomit off my shirt seven times today.”

it gets easier after that fourth trimester, sure. but only after the full mirror pregnancy has been ticked off the calendar do i actually feel as if my body or my life are in any way my own.  slowly, my self creep back, at first distorted, hard to recognize. slowly, between six and eight months after the baby arrives, my sense of being utterly consumed, of being with child in a way even more total than during pregnancy itself, trails off…not with the bang of birth, but with a whimper.

one morning i wake up and notice that i’ve actually slept. all week. ’til an almost-civilized hour. and i go in to find my little baby laughing at her brother, who’s peering into her crib, and she’s watching him knowingly as if she’s more than cognisant of exactly what’s going to come next and i realize that our rhythms have shifted from pure bodily function to social patterns – that i no longer have an infant, but a very small, very sweet, watchful, fierce little girl.  in a baby body, but a baby body that rocks and crawls and explores and feeds itself whatever it finds on the floor, indiscriminately, and gets closer to independence every day.  she loves the cat. she has a sense of humour. she high-fives, and dislikes lentils.  her lip quivers when i tell her “no.”

and i congratulate myself and say, “hey! you! you had a baby!” and then i look around and know that it is done, survived, that long, brain-numbing road of extended gestation that seems to be my lazy, elderly arse’s response to infancy and colic and sleep-deprivation and nursing.  it is done, except for the nursing, and even that begins to wane, takes less precedence, demands little except a happy cuddle.

we are two now, almost fully. semi-civilized both, my baby girl and i each brought safely to ourselves.

the whimper that escapes comes from me.  and i do not know if it is relief or longing, for that strange half-life for two that will never come again.

Posey eating shoe. she's worth 16 months.

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i know not everyone seems to have these pitifully long elephantine gestations, in the sense that some of you bounce back into your jeans and your actual senses of self miraculous weeks after birth. i consider you robots amazing specimens.

did you have that sense of being still utterly baby-consumed after birth? what was your mirror gestation length? and how did you feel coming out the other side?

today is Posey’s due date. it’s also my mom’s 60th birthday.

in my first pregnancy, with Finn, my due date was a source of excitement and mystery. the 4th of August, proclaimed the calendar – or maybe the 3rd, but the 4th was Dave’s mom’s birthday and so we went with that, thinking how fortuitous, how cool – and it never so much as occurred to me that i might deliver anytime before August rolled around in all its grand and bloated swelter.

but when August did roll in that year, we were three months bereaved…shell-shocked still, hurting, trying to put together some semblance of a life. i don’t remember if we ever managed to send Dave’s mom a card for her birthday that year.

when i got pregnant with Oscar a short while later, i barely noted his due date. instead i counted the weeks until viability, the days until we passed the points at which leaking had begun or the airlift had happened…and the 26+1 mark at which Finn had been born. i burned into my brain the date at which we’d clear the 28w hurdle, after which so much goes so much better. that was all i was bold enough to ask for.

but then time had her sweet, merciful dulling way with me and when i got pregnant again last fall, due at the end of June, i was fool enough to imagine a baby born on my grandmother’s birthday, the 20th…a full-term, 39ish-week baby. instead, on a Friday in late November, the day Dave turned 33, the u/s technician turned her face away from us as she spun the empty screen in our direction.

so on the morning of my 36th birthday this past January, when i woke up jet-lagged and bleary and faintly nauseous at a bizarre and ungodly hour in a hotel in England, and quietly and with hammering hopeful, fearful heart peed on a plastic stick i’d brought with me because i am at all times prepared, i didn’t dare shout out to the sleeping Dave dude! i’m pregnant! due on my mom’s birthday! i didn’t want to think too much about due dates, then…just wanted to get through that day, and the next, without blood. i only casually mentioned the congruence of dates to my mother much later, but with the caveat we’re really just trying to get safely to August. and she nodded. she knew.

but today my mom is sixty and her granddaughter is 23 days old and a whopping 7 pounds, 2 ounces and there will be cake and i am grateful, humbled by this happy ending, this coda to my pregnancy and to the whole journey of pregnancy in general, for me. we end with cake, not tears. and my mom is celebrating her seventh decade by getting her first computer so i’m bringing the blog out of the closet as a way of introducing her to this fascinating network that is teh internets (note to mom: intentional spelling mistake) so…wish her a happy birthday if you have a minute.

and tell me…all of you, whether your pregnancies were full-term or cut short, whether you’ve lost or gone over and delivered beautiful, healthy babies…did you note your due dates as they passed? do you think of them? what’s your relationship to this semi-arbitrary spot on the calendar?

um, i am heading to the hospital.  nine hours before scheduled cerclage removal.

my water broke.

thanks for all the love that has brought us safe thus far…will keep you posted.

no matter how grateful one is, the end of pregnancy gets long.  especially when one kinda thought it would all be well over by now, had mentally groomed oneself to be ready for the shitshow of the NICU.

being spared one endurance test usually means you’re trading for another.  cynics’ handbook 101, friends.

maybe the end stage gets especially harsh when one runs in online circles where a disproportionate number of friends have lost term babies without warning…to stillbirth, to unforeseen genetic anomalies, to all kinds of tragedies that caught them by surprise even in these late, last, seemingly certain days of expectation.  i fret a little, chafe at the bit, try to jiggle and coerce the baby into moving, into reassuring me as best she can that all is well in there in her little fluid cocoon.  i tell myself to be patient, remind myself that i will likely be willing to kill small fluffy animals for this much time on my hands in just a few weeks.  i rub my belly and marvel at it, knowing that it will never be this big  – or this taut and firm, oh glory – ever again. i try to tell myself that all will likely unfold just fine, and that i do not need to be in control of this event or when or how it occurs. i tell myself chances are everything will be just fine.  i bought an AIDSwalk keychain the other day with the word “trust” on it.  it’s in my bag.

but my brain isn’t listening to me or to much of what i tell it.  it’s not that it’s consumed with worry about worst-case scenarios, either…more just that it’s fixated so soundly on the physical realities of this pregnancy that it flits through the worries like it flits through everything else, like a bad hostess drunk on sherry.  my mind runs on spin-cycle these days, a lather-rinse-repeat refrain of hourly pre-labour twinges that leave me caught in the undertow of ow, hmmm, that one hurt, could this be it?

promptly followed by nothing.  dead air of the uterus, not a cervical cramp in the land.  this child is going to go to prom still inside me.

just as my brain recovers some of its dignity and capacity for self-determination, another vicious little surge sneaks up and stabs me in the stitch, still mightily holding strong despite the complete lack of cervix around it.

i have been in low-grade labour for three weeks now.  it is gradually eroding my ability to form coherent thoughts, especially coherent thoughts not related to this beloved baby and whether or not i will actually deliver her sometime soon.  my brain is all bump, all the time.  and i am weary of it, and weary of myself and the monotony of this refrain.  i wanted to write about something else, desperately…if not upcoming elections – American, Canadian, take your pick – or abstinence-only education or Oscar’s wretched little cold, at least something thoughtful about the whole balancing act of planning to welcome a child once you know that all can go wrong, and how weird it is to wash little onesies and pack them in a drawer with cotton-mouthed fear that the other shoe is about to drop and slam home that the universe really is into bad jokes…

but then i cramped up and tightened, and that was all she wrote.

and hell, at least it keeps me from fixating on the bogeymen.

when i wake up tomorrow morning – barring any drastic excitement before then – i will be further along than i have ever been before, more pregnant than my body has ever managed.

i am 36 weeks today, the threshold of what some – few, but some – definitions are willing to call term.  Oscar was born in the wee hours of the morning at 36 weeks, 1 day.  if i’m honest with myself, i feel overdue…a hundred months pregnant, long past the expected point of delivery…not because this baby couldn’t use another month inside, my rational mind cautions, but because this pregnancy has been so tentative and fraught with what-ifs from the beginning that the bar was set low; 24 weeks prayed for, 28 hoped for, 32 seeming bounty beyond all wildest expectations.  i have been on high-alert for months, as ready as i can be, prepared to drop everything and run to the hospital at the least sign of labour.

well, labour came, Wednesday, but not to me…my half-brother and his partner welcomed a daughter, their firstborn.  and i had to give my head a shake and remind myself, severely, that it was her turn, not mine…that i am in no rush.  i am weary, but i am in no rush.  i figure if i keep saying it, i’ll start believing it.

the baby’s name is Bronwyn Elise.  i love it, but i grieved a little hearing it…because if you check the comments on last week’s name post, you’ll see Bronwen was a top choice for us for a middle name.  what are the chances?  Bronwen was what i was almost called, before my father’s objections convinced my mother to go with the cutesy Bonnie instead – oh, my mother laughed yesterday when she heard he was finally stuck with it – and it has long been Dave’s favourite female name.  we couldn’t quite come up with a short form that worked well enough for us to use it as a first name: having a Bon and a Bron in the same house didn’t do much for us, and Wendy, as the name of Dave’s we-shall-never-speak-of-this-again first wife, was out.  but i wanted Bronwen in the mix.  my father remarried another Bonnie when i was less than two.  i’ve shared my name with my stepmother my entire life.  i nearly changed my name to Bronwen when i was in my teens…and in some secret part of me, have always considered it mine.  using it on a daughter would have been, in a way, my only chance to name her in some sense after me, me alone…because my real name has never been mine alone.  now Bronwen, even if we used it, could never be for me alone…it is hers, now, the little eight-pound beauty.  and that same small part of me is sad, wistful.

but it also narrows our choices, which probably will make the overall naming circus easier in the long run.

in any case she is here and wonderful and new and so i wander the maternity ward these days cooing at this lovely little niece creature, looking like i’ve swallowed a basketball, like i’m loitering just in case.  i think i make the nurses nervous.  perhaps it’s the licorice cigar and the manic Groucho Marx imitation.

if i thought my bambina had a womb with a view, i’d understand her staying safely put.  that look on my face scares me too.

we went out to the market this morning.

upon return, in amongst the weekend flyers dragged in from the porch advertising marvellous Walmart specials and bizarre lawn ornaments i can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy, i found a book.  an apparently new book, with price tag still attached.  not the sort of book that usually comes with the sales ads…there’s not a single Huggies coupon in the thing.

it is titled What NOT To Name Your Baby.

how this mysterious tome came to grace my kitchen table, i do not know.  i do know that the book is quite entertaining, despite the fact that Oscar is among the more than one thousand names it sardonically prohibits…i’ve come to expect the world to take a bit of a piss on that front.  we’re fair game.  in North America, having a kid named Oscar perpetuates a rather thick skin in a parent.  yep, like the Grouch.  he’s our favourite muppet. or, yes, we LOVE Academy Award season.  (insert sarcasm as necessary).  my favourite…oh yes, we call his penis the Oscar Meyer weiner…we picked the name for that very reason! (that last is a fictional response to a real question posed to me by an elderly woman on the street one day.  charming.)

i have vague suspicions that the anonymous book donor may actually be a worried grandparent, afraid that we’ll either call the baby Elmo or Miss Piggie this time round (my father’s family are vastly tickled by their oft-repeated and immensely clever jokes on this front) or that we do, in fact, actually plan to continue calling her Hughloise after her arrival.  we don’t…we just like telling my mom that.  her middle name’s Louise, so we say it’s for her.  then she turns this gorgeous, flustered red.  very fun.

(if in the colossally unlikely case that five separate ultrasounds were wrong and she is actually a he, i’m betting that Dave will cave and actually let me call him Hugh, but that’s as close as we’ll really get to Hughloise.  his half of the creation – Heloise, for the twelfth-century errant abbess – never quite made it onto my lists.  i like old names and all, but not ones that call to mind those Hints from Heloise newspaper columns of my childhood.  i never liked her mayonnaise recipes one bit.)

if we’re casting our thanks/aspersions in the wrong direction, though, and anyone out there would like to take credit for the kind and mysterious gift of What Not to Name Your Baby, please speak now.  i think you’ve already said your piece.

and if anyone has any naming suggestions – preferably in the realm of “austere yet dowdy”, no cute Kaylees or eltra-femme Larissas or neologic McBritneylyns need apply, fine names though those may be (or not, ahem) for other people’s children – bring ‘em on.  right now, we’re kinda taken by Hortense, inexplicably NOT an entry in the book…think of the nicknaming possibilities!!***

i wonder if we should start locking our door when we go out?

***uh, kidding on Hortense.

we left Korea for good that winter.

the fall beforehand was golden and rushed, one of those queerly vivid transition epochs where the body and mind are open and receptive, future utterly unknown and thus all changes possible answers in masquerade.  it is heady, that hurtle towards the break, and for me it was a productive time -i started writing professionally for the first time in years, took up jogging for the first time ever.  looking ahead, i tried to lay ground. looking around me, with eyes that knew i was leaving, i tried to store all that i could of the city and culture, the small apartment with its sliding glass doors, the autumn light pouring in, the sweet-sour tang of mokkoli and cheom-chi kimbap, the hectic market across the street, laden with strange fruit that had become familiar.

in casting ourselves upon the fates that fall, we went whole hog.  i threw out the birth control pills, had my cystic ovaries checked at Our Lady of Mercy Virgin Mary Obstetrics and Gynecology – the head OB had learned his English at a Catholic college in the United States, he informed me proudly – and one Monday morning in November, watched two clear blue lines materialize on a pregnancy test i’d had to play charades to acquire from the apothecary’s on the corner.  there is a lot of vocabulary that a life spent in classrooms and bars does not necessarily teach.

every season of life has its soundtracks.  this one was a single CD, a nothing-else-quite-like it literate and intimate collection of folky imagery-laden songs that a friend who lived in another city had brought one weekend in October, that we played all through that fall and early winter as we planned and packed and i threw up.  those songs, with their quirky rhythm and their haunting, non-linear stories, were burned on me in those months just as Korea was.  i was wax, taking everything in.  and all my hopes and anticipation sang in me to those tunes and words, lullabies to the little life inside around whom all the changes centred.

we brought the CD back to Canada, though the light was harsher here.  the last time i played it was in the hospital after my water broke too too early, headphones stretched across my belly.  i was still hopeful, the laws of inertia internalized to such an extent that continuing to hope was not so hard as it has been ever since.  i chose, the first night after my airlift, in the 3 am quiet of the hospital room, to tune in to the baby inside, to spend what time we had left together present to him or her.  i sang to him, spoke to her – we had been told girl, then boy, then girl again, that time ’round – played him music.  for that three weeks, i was tender and more in-the-moment than i have ever been in my life, connected and maternal in ways i hadn’t imagined i had in me.  until he died in my arms.  all those months of hoping and planning, all we’d tried to build toward, all the light and song packed into that period, dissipated into ash.

last night, Dave and i were watching back episodes of a tv show on the computer.  in the climactic moments, a song started up, a song neither of us had heard.  but he recognized the voice…the same singer whom, as if by unspoken, accidental agreement, we have not listened to in over three years.  my ears perked up, and just the familiarity of a single word, characteristically pronounced at the end of a line, assured me he was right.  the scene unfolded on the screen in front of us.  but i didn’t see it anymore.

i saw a small apartment with muted light falling over a sleeping mat, a huge desk rescued from the side of the street one evening.  i saw the campus-issue furniture and the pillows brought back as bounty from Thailand, the coffee grinder propped up against the yogurt maker and the funny little packets of bacteria bought at the same apothecary’s as the pregnancy test.  i saw ashtrays and ESL books, plastic tables set outside the neighbourhood corner store for drinking at, neon signs advertising singing rooms, internet cafes, chicken.  i saw rows and rows of persimmons, ripe to bursting, and crisp pears that look like apples, and packets of salty seaweed for snacking on.  i saw, though i had not known i remembered.  and i felt it all again, the hope and the shattering that followed, as if the episode we were watching were one from our own lives.

and i wept, because i knew the ending to all that risk and hope and openness.  because it was like watching a replay of my own personal train wreck, and i could not shout out a warning, could not do anything but sit and let the brokenheartedness of it all wash over me.  and because it was beautiful, too, to have it all come flooding back, to remember what it felt like to be in that skin and that mind, faithful for the last time to the belief that all will ultimately be right.

i like to think i’ve healed.  but not once in this pregnancy, or with Oscar, have i stretched headphones over my belly, unselfconscious, and sung to my child.  not like that.

i don’t even know if i should try.  i don’t know if i can.  i wish i could, though.  i realized last night that i wish i could.

your comments shine through my screen like benedictions.  the overflow of truth and thoughtfulness and humour, raw and warm, calms me, strengthens.  i bask.  i eat up ideas, cross-referencing, googling hungrily.  call answered.

i sit humbled, grateful.  you took me by surprise.  i did not know, not like this, that the well ran so deep and generous, that the collective wisdom of a mythological sisterhood could be tapped like this.  i feel as if i’ve wandered into a Little House on the Prairie stageset, into a quilting bee community of yore where i am mothered, friended, surrounded and held up.   my birth coaches, sixty strong.  your stories widen my horizons, my sense of the possible.  your stories make me less afraid.
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i have never known how to ask for help, before.

Mad wrote a powerful post the other night about fear and walking at night and the Take Back the Night phenomenon that swept college campuses in the late 80s and early 90s.  that was my coming of age, that era, and i sang that song for years.

my mother’s spent her life more than usually mistrustful of the unknown, and she tried desperately to inculcate in me caution, wariness of all that the newspapers said i should fear as a young and vulnerable woman in a predatory age.  but, like so many, it was not the unknown that hurt me, that damaged my sense of my own worth and my right to inviolate status.  i did not even have words, at eighteen, for what happened.  but i had anger, at the misdirected fear that smothered without protecting, and shame, in buckets.  the shame kept me tongue-tied, unable to ask for help or support.  the anger made me defiant.  and in the mess of my fumbling attempts to find healing, i began to walk, at night, alone, alert…head high, keys spiked.  i walked and walked, for nearly two years, compulsively.  it was a way of refusing to wrap myself in the shroud of victimization and dependence that society held out as a false promise of safety.  it was a way of taking back my own body, as well as the night.  but mostly it was a way to quiet the deep, crippling sense of vulnerability and fear that ate away at me in those years, the panic that threatened each time someone came close.

it took, in the end, years and years and ultimately a conscious letting go.  but i walked my way out of that trauma, that damage…literally walked away from it, each step a blind, grasping effort to surmount fear.

i think i have been trying to do the same with the trauma of my children’s births.  except a waddle is not a confidence-inducing stride, and i have been unable to outpace myself, my fear, my history.  so i have had to face my shame this time, own it and voice it and say aloud, “i have been hurt.  i am frightened.  i do not know how to go forward by myself.”

the warmth of response has taken so much of the power from the shame and the fear that i wonder, sadly, what might have happened had i been brave enough to try this tack half a lifetime ago.
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i waited two hours to see my OB today, because half the practice is on summer vacation.  my fear and shame sat with me through the wait, despite all your words…i felt like a kid waiting to be called into the principal’s office, dreading humiliation and misunderstanding.  it’s not being my own medical advocate that intimidates me, but admitting my vulnerability, admitting how badly Oscar’s birth shook me despite his survival.  being supplicant and helpless is not my strong suit.  i was afraid i’d find myself tongue-tied, once again, unable to stand up for my need for agency and dignity with this impending birth…unable to admit how much i fear the panic that swallowed me last time, the panic i failed utterly to master.

i really like my OB.  she’s been with me through all four pregnancies, though never – by circumstance – for delivery or d&c.  i trust her.  she has looked me in the eye and said, “i’m sorry.  i made a mistake.”  she has always treated me like a human being.

and still i could barely meet her eyes as i unfurled the litany of facts and complications that have left me so afraid.  i hunched on the crinkly paper of the exam table, picked at the flannel blanket.  i didn’t want to overstate, be dramatic, have her write me off.  i trailed to a halt, handed over the list of questions i’d posted here the other night with all their what-ifs and maybes and stretches of what’s commonly done.  i looked at her and choked the obvious out.  i’m just…so scared.

she didn’t patronize me, or pat me on the arm and tell me not to worry my pretty little head.  she listened, and looked at me, and said, “i will come in with you, if i can.  i’ll put that on your file, right here.  i’d like to be with you through this birth, if that might help?”

they don’t do that here.  my mum has worked at the hospital for years, and i know they don’t.  there’s an agreement between the OBs that on-call status is respected, because the on-call docs have to be on site, away from their kids or their sick spouses or their beer or what have you, so having subs come in is frowned upon.  i looked at her warily, said “i’d feel guilty.”

she said, “don’t.”

and then tears welled up and streamed down my face and she handed me Kleenex and i felt six years old and like i’d just been rescued from the Kmart Lost and Found desk.

we talked.  plans for induction or c-section are tabled until i reach 37 weeks still pregnant.  we will try the delayed cord clamping, and a few other things both from her repetoire and your suggestions to try to minimize the likelihood of retained placenta and surgery.  we will aim for skin-to-skin and nursing right after birth.  she will work with Dave and the delivery nurses to try to do as much perineal support, lubrication, and stretching as possible.  we may try to break up any cervical adhesions upon cerclage removal at 36 weeks…or wait until labour depending on how imminent that appears at that point.  she’s checking on anti-anxiety options, and depending on how things present we may try an early epidural if that’s possible instead.  slowing things down a little, for me, might not be bad.  she approved of the advice i’d been given here to try to minimize prolapse.

and most important, she’s going to talk with the entire OB team about me, in case she can’t be there when i ultimately land at L&D.  and if at any point, with her or another doc, i panic and feel i just can’t confront another possible gong show, it’ll be on my file that i can ask for a c-section without any argument from the medical team.  not my first choice, but a choice i’m grateful to know is there.  i see her again next week, and we’ll talk some more.

tears are still close to the surface, tonight.  relief, gratitude, astonishment.  i haven’t given birth yet, obviously…the actual event is still ahead of us.  but the birth i feared, the panic i could not walk away from…i think its spectre has been largely deflated, weakened.  by you, with all your stories and your virtual hands in mine.  by one doctor stepping up to my side.

trust.  antidote to fear.

the longer this pregnancy continues with merciful uneventfulness, the more amazed i am.  and the more nervous.  a new and different low-grade panic wells up in my gut these days…not miscarriage, not genetic disorders, not uber-prematurity and brain bleeds and oscillating ventilators. just…birth.

there’s clearly got to be a birthin’ around here sometime soon.

(me and my pet Volkswagen and an – uneaten – magic mushroom, three weeks ago at 29 weeks…by the lovely and talented Kate)

everything’s dandy with the bambino, and the weeks of crisis delivery prognoses are creeping past, therefore…the more my razor-sharp neuroses get to hone in on me.

it’s not the fear of the unknown, but of a three-peat.  experience says i deliver fast, and early, and my babies have big heads for their gestational ages.  i have a scarred cervix that tends to resist dilation, then tear.  my placentas don’t detach properly, causing retention once, hemorrhage the second time ’round.  and my body – this time, as each time before – is weakened at its core from extended bedrest.

i feel silly about my fear…ashamed, even.  but it is real and grows bigger as i do.  birth has marked me in ways i do not like.  i do not want to dwell on those wounds, or give them power…i’d like to get beyond them.  but i am not sure i can until this baby is born and this third birth confronted and endured…and hopefully celebrated.  my fear is that the birth will add to the sum of baggage i need to unpack, rather than – perhaps? – being healing.  i’d like healing. i’m just afraid to ask for what seems like so much.

i had what was pretty much a post-traumatic stress reaction in labour with Oscar.  flashbacks, full-blown panic attack.  on top of that, i had complications that knocked out my pelvic floor: some clitoral tearing, a vaginal and bladder prolapse, an unwanted fourth-degree epiosiotomy that went straight through my perineum and then tore four inches up.  i was stitched three layers deep, stem to stern, and then had to be torn open again when they whisked me off to surgery to retrieve the hemorrhaging placenta.  barely a quick photo with my newborn before being rushed off for the d&c, then three hours alone and shaking, still panicked, in recovery…that, after having lost Finn only hours after his birth, was probably worst.

i had a birth plan for O’s delivery…written to try to remind myself that once we passed 35 weeks the birth needn’t be the powerless, frightening, emergency event that Finn’s had been.  it wasn’t a complicated plan…my only caveats were to avoid episiotomy and to be with baby after birth for at least an hour, for bonding and an attempt at breastfeeding.  neither worked out, though in the first case no one ever explained why, despite my shouts of “no!”.  the whole thing still turned out to be a powerless, frightening, emergency event.  had any of it been necessary to safely deliver Oscar, my sense of violation wouldn’t have mattered worth shit, to me…but he was fine through the whole blessed mess.  i felt like a piece of meat, ravaged and dismissed.

i do not have the powers of self-delusion to simply compose another birth plan and assume it’ll go better this time.

i see my OB Wednesday, for the first time since Halifax released me.  i want to talk about birth…about what options are reasonably open to me, about what factors are controllable and what odds i have of a different type of birth than the last two.  we haven’t talked about it yet because until last Friday there was an assumption i’d deliver in Halifax…though the Halifax team were hoping to get me past 32 weeks and so didn’t want to talk about it, either.  but now i’m set to deliver here.  with whoever’s on call, because that’s how the system works.  and i wake up at night sweating.

i know my own fear is my worst enemy.  i also know that i can’t think myself out of a post-traumatic stress reaction, especially if this labour comes as fast and strong as the last two.  i’ve played with the idea of just asking for a c-section, except i doubt the likelihood of me making it to 38 weeks without going into labour.

i plan to take Evening Primrose Oil from about 35 weeks – orally at first, to help break down scar tissue, then vaginally after 37 weeks.  the cerclage, according to Halifax, will come out at 36.

i’d also – if i have a vaginal birth – like to try delayed cord cutting in hopes of preventing placental retention and getting to actually hold this child and be with her for the period following her birth.  it’s the one thing i ever really invested in, in terms of having my babies come into the world…the skin-on-skin of that first hour or two, reprieve from the work of birth.  if the baby has any issues, obviously that dream flies out the window, but if we can get to 35 or 36 weeks it’s far more likely to be me and my complications that lessens that possibility.  and thus i’d like to do what i can to help the placenta separate cleanly.  but there’s resistance here towards delaying cutting the cord, particularly with an early-ish baby.  my OB might respect my wishes, but the other docs?  i haven’t been overwhelmed with some of their listening skills.  thus i wonder if an induction – so as to be sure i’m with my own OB – might be wise, despite my aversion to the idea?

i did perineal massage when i was pregnant with Oscar and am willing to do it again, but don’t know what impact the significant epiosotomy/tear scar has on its effectiveness, especially when it so clearly did sweet f#ck all last time?

i want to know what you know.  i’m going to end up making what decisions are open to me based on odds…odds of a joyful, peaceful, non-brutalizing delivery, however it comes about.  the more people’s experiences i become familiar with, the better sense i’ll be able to gather of what those odds really are.  Dr. Google isn’t really helping.  so please.  no holds barred.

have any of you ever had a fourth-degree tear or episiotomy that didn’t open or need to be opened again in a subsequent birth?  if it did, how did the healing go the second time around?

did any of you who’ve had a cerclage try Evening Primrose Oil (or something else?) to help minimize scar tissue on the cervix?  do you think it helped?

any experience with delayed cord cutting, or with retained placentas and other methods of trying to minimize the likelihood of that happening?

has anyone who’s had a prolapse not have it happen again in a subsequent delivery?  were you able to do anything to impact how that turned out, one way or the other?

anybody able to compare a prolonged transition-type labour (contractions a minute apart for an hour or more) with an induction?  i know the latter are supposed to be really hard to tolerate, but i’m wondering if my own labours aren’t perhaps already on that track already?  would pitocin intensify that?

any general advice regarding planned c-sections vs. induction vs. taking one’s chances with the on-call docs?

is it common in many places to be allowed to hold your newborn for the stitching period after a c-section?  (it is in Halifax, not here.  policy.  bah.)

does anyone know if ativan or some other anti-anxiety medication can be safely given during labour if panic and PTSD symptoms set in?  i know it’s safe (or at least given) during pregnancy, but i’m curious about whether it’s usable so close to delivery.

i know birth is not a controlled event.  i also know that nothing matters more than taking home a healthy baby.  but i am still hoping, nervously, that maybe i can come out of this birth able to focus on that baby and not on my own mental and physical damage.  i’d like to ask for a positive, empowering, affirming experience…but i’ll happily settle for less than wretched.  so…keeping in mind that i live in a province where midwives are not certified and where the doula i met with told me that with my history she might not be able to do much to mitigate the physical repeat of past complications…tell me what you think makes sense for me.  and tell me what you can about what’s been positive for you, in birth…please…no matter what the circumstances.

(just…pretty please…don’t tell me just to relax and it’ll all be fine.  i will personally chew your arms from your body so that you can never, never type again.  )

with the release from bedrest and my fledgling return to civil society come privileges.  i can walk…slowly.  i can dance…sorta.  i can march out at any time of day or night and procure my own Nibs cake (insert favourite heartburn-inducing poison here).

sure, the price is high.  anyone who’s ever been pregnant will attest that with the whole going out in public thing comes…well, the public.  other people.  who note one’s advanced maternal state, and feel obliged to comment upon it.  or to touch it…it, of course, being me.  i don’t mind the belly rubbing…though it makes me feel vaguely like a shi-tzu being cooed over, however pleasantly…but the boob-petting is perhaps just a touch too familiar for me.  i shit you not, a middle aged woman patted my left breast last weekend and said, oh honey, they fall down after this.  i gave her my best Maidenform smile and tried to claim mine’ve bounced back smashingly, thank you very much, but i mostly succeeded in drooling lemon water down the front of my offendingly obvious cleavage whilst trying NOT to look like a member of Junior Prudes of America.  shock tends to send my wits packing for awhile, but the desire to impress the weirdos with my cool?  alas, that never leaves me.

coming off four months of bedrest and relative seclusion has left me vulnerable and awkward in the interchange of niceties between people in public.  i am too honest, too eager.  i’m so astonished by my good fortune at actually being out and about and still pregnant to boot that i feel like a kid on a blind date, all aw-shucks awkward in my own stretched skin and yet horny as hell, bubbling over with Too Much Information the moment the subject of the pregnancy is broached.  far, far too many people who do not read this blog now know about my pesky cervical issues, friends.

two years and a bit ago, when i was first sprung from the hospital after seven weeks flat on my back gestating Oscar, i was shocked by the invasiveness being visibly pregnant seems to invite in others.  it hurt, then, the cheery throw-away barrage of is this your first? and what do you have at home? that i could not answer honestly without causing the faces behind the banal pleasantries to shrink away in mortification.  i didn’t enjoy their embarrassment, their discomfort.  on the other hand, i didn’t enjoy pretending i was some sort of first-time birth virgin, either, and thus subjecting myself to knowing lectures about how i couldn’t possibly imagine what was ahead…nor did i enjoy negating my firstborn’s existence just to make people feel better about having pried into my personal history innocently expecting to find only sunbeams.  i wasn’t sorry that i only spent two weeks negotiating the Big Wide World after bedrest that time around.

this time, i’ve already passed the two week mark of happy Out-and-Aboutness.  i’m not so raw, this time, nor so unprepared for strangers’ well-intentioned curiosity.  and since i have a living child, my short but honest answers to people’s questions don’t thud all conversation to a halt quite so brutally as they did two years ago…the crickets still chirp, but we all generally recover before the tumbleweeds blow in.

in other words, even the one thing i dreaded about assuming this belated mantle of A Normal, Blessed Pregnancy is going pretty well dandy…even if it does feel like a circus act.  i bumble and beam and accept the boob-groping with what i hope passes for grace…because awkward as i feel, waddling my way down the streets slower than the senior citizens, i am nonetheless aware, acutely, that this is a state of grace i’m in.  i look around me, wary, wondering who – infertile, babylost, recently miscarried – aches at the sight of my swollen belly.  i look into the eyes of the old ladies with their uninvited stories of labours and grandkids and see longing for a time forever gone, slipped past.  i look in the mirror and sigh at the size of my behind, and then give my head a shake and straighten up a bit and run my fingers over the old and new stretch marks and breathe deep and dare to grieve that this will – knock wood for safe arrivals – be the last time i do this, this crazy terrifying journey that i yet will miss and mourn the end of when the day comes and i have to face up to the reality that i will never again walk this particular tightrope of want and love and holding my breath.