Nine Months Is A Long Time

Sometimes I feel like I will be pregnant forever. I will go on wearing the same three maternity shirts, waking up a three A.M. feeling hot and needing to pee, feeling uncomfortable twinges that I now recognize as someone bumping into my bladder or kicking my ribs. I look back at photos and my old body seems unreal, like a dream I used to have. The last few weeks of pregnancy stretch out in some strange warped twilight zone of protracted existence.

I’m trying to bond with the baby, to think about her squished up tight there in the dark listening to my heartbeat and voice, to think about welcoming her into the world. It’s weird and somewhat difficult attempting to love someone you can’t see. Most of the time I’m either so focused on work, or so tired recovering afterwards, that I’m not thinking much of her at all. When I’m knitting, or soaking in the bath, or when D gets affectionate to the belly—those are the times I think about her more.

Sometimes I think about how my body has grown something from a cell to a complete little human, how it has unbelievably stretched itself with surprisingly little ill effect, how it will push life into the world. How as of a particular second in time there will exist an entirely new being on the planet, with her own personality.

Most of the time it seems totally surreal, like trying to imagine heaven. Occasionally a feeling or belief will wash over me and I’ll realize, this is what eternity might be like, this is what it’s all about, and it will change how I see everything. But most of the time I live in the daily muck and have to remind myself to think about God if at all. That’s how it is with the baby—most of the time I’m going about, being my laid-back self, living life in the usual sphere, and occasionally it will strike me that life is about to change. Forever. Any day now.

Week Thirty-Seven