We've been back in CA for a little over a month now. It's been a busy month. A period once again where there has not been much naturally occurring time for reflection. We brought Nick to college, and have been having a few nights each week without kids. Except for the one still on the inside that is. The days have been full of the business of life, in addition to preparations for the upcoming birth and our changing home and routines. We've got tiny clothes, diapers and little blankets around. There is easy to prepare food in the freezer, bottles in the cupboard and infant acetaminophin in the medicine cabinet.
I feel like a storm is coming or something. Something unknown is headed our way. I am reading all the books and following what seems like good advice to prepare for something that I just can't quite imagine. Somebody else is coming out of my body. I don't know him yet, but I have never been closer with anyone in my life. And he is coming out and we will meet him soon! I can't really wrap my mind around this, and I don't think there is really any way to prepare for it any more than we have...
And as much as things will change for me, I can't even imagine what it will be like for our baby boy. He has been living in water, not exposed to air or needing to breathe or eat, for his entire existence so far. He only knows light and dark and the way that things sound when muffled through liquid. He has been floating without much influence from gravity, and for the past four weeks at least he has been living life upside down in his increasingly cramped little world. He's going to get the squeeze of his life through the birth canal soon, which should help empty his lungs of amniotic fluid, and then he will be out in the air and the light and his circulatory system will switch directions, the umbilical cord will pulse and then cease to function as it did, and then God willing he will open his eyes and breathe! It's too bizarre, I can't believe it. But they tell me it's really going to happen. In fact, it's happened to all of us. I just can't believe that we all get here this way.
Yet at the same time I am increasingly aware that things cannot go on much longer as they are. My abdomen is stretched to the limit. There is little room in there anymore for anything but baby, including the air in my lungs at times. I feel the pressure of another body in there on my hips and groin when I stand up. Getting up from a lying down position has become particularly difficult, and considering how often I get up to go to the bathroom every night, it's a bit of a chore. This just can't go on too much longer.
But what happens next is a big mystery. I've imagined it many times so far, but it is still so unknown. I am getting ready to cross a major threshold. My body is about to do something that it supposedly is perfectly prepared for and designed to do, but it has never even come close to experiencing before. And where there were two of us there will now be three. I feel the magic of this time everywhere I go these days. Strangers ask me, with excitement in their eyes, when he is due to arrive, and then wish us luck with smiles. I take stock of our lives and see the baby implements piled up, the relative orderliness of the house, the waves of well wishes and offers of support from friends and family, the happiness in our household. I feel very lucky and rich. I find myself wishing again and again that all babies and mothers may be as happy and supported as me. Everything changes, always. But for me I know it will change in a big way very soon. And it will be changed forever. I wait with some trepidation but plenty of joy and gratitude!
