Journal Excerpt

He’s dancing in there again. That feels like the only way to describe the continual movement going on within my innards. Sometimes I am forced to clutch my belly and hold my breath until it passes. I can look down and see his head shifting from one side to another, see his hand poking up on one side while his feet stretch out the other. Someone told me the uterus is thinner the second time around so you feel things more. It’s started to wake me up at night, every few hours. This is what people don’t tell you, that you start to lose sleep even before the baby’s out.

The due date is less than a month away. Home stretch. Nine months is definitely worse the second time around. I feel weighed down, like someone trying to swim with weights around my waist; I have to screw up mental energy before hoisting myself up or bending down to reach something. The list of imperatives that need to get done runs like a news ticker through my mind—organize office, unpack decorations, buy lamps—and none of it gets done. By the time I put her down for a nap, I don’t feel up to doing much more than lying down.

Sometimes I feel if I have to read Cinderella in Chinese or sing The Wheels on the Bus one more time I’m going to lose it. Lose it in that desperate way I used to feel when I walked into the E.R. and saw five more charts in the bin. Back then, that usually meant the same thing it does now: that I need to take a break, shower, and sleep.

So part of what I’m learning is to adjust my expectations, to give myself grace. I have a hard time letting other people take care of E without feeling guilty, which I think stems from my assumption that since I’m not working I should be able to handle it all the time. But this is work. Carrying around a cavorting full-term fetus while entertaining a two year-old is work. So I guess I’ll be okay taking naps. And if someone wants to help watch her so I can actually get out of the house once by myself, I might say yes.