The Eternally Pregnant Woman

Week 39

*Look, early labor is not always very glamorous, so just to give you a heads up - I will be briefly describing things like bloody show and mucus plugs in this post. Nothing too gory, but you’ve been warned nonetheless. It's all part of the package.



Just for the record, I was okay with pretending that this baby might not come for a while. Even though every part of my body was telling me to keep my bags packed for the hospital, I knew that if I fed into the excitement, even only a few days of impatience would end up eating me alive. Then, the doctor actually confirmed my insanity. On Wednesday he officially deemed this baby ready to be born… and he gave me the green light to go bananas with all of the excitement I’d been bottling up for the past week and a half.

I had my membranes stripped, and as soon as I got home, had my bloody show. A big disgusting glop of bloody snot fell out of me. After gagging a little, I eagerly picked up the What to Expect book that’s been planted next to the toilet for the past nine months and learned that labor should theoretically start within 24-48 hours, although occasionally it can take up to a day or two beyond that. SWEET.

The next morning was uneventful, but I was still in pretty good spirits, knowing that things were on a roll that wasn’t going to stop now. About mid-afternoon I went to the bathroom and in looking down at one great big unmistakable blob of mucus, I got another hands-on lesson in the physiology of early labor that I’d spent so much of my life reading about in all of those pregnancy books. The Mucus plug. A lot of women, the book warns, can pass this without knowing it as they might lose it gradually over a period of time. Not me. This cervix was clearly uncorked in one fowl swoop of the tp. Then, just for good measure and a dose of confirmation, the rest of it came out in my next trip to the potty.

*This meant that the first stage of labor (dilation) had begun on it’s own
*The baby’s head was about as far down as it could possibly be at this point
*My membranes had been stripped - so labor had even been given an extra jump-start of induction
*I was already dilated to a “good” 3 centimeters
*And now, with the presence of my bloody show and the loss of my mucus plug out of the way, dilation and effacement were continuing enough to allow for their passage.

SO BASICALLY every single bullet point in every single pregnancy book that I own (and I own a good few) has been checked off, except for those damned contractions - which brings me to last night.

Needless to say, they started… and they started hard. Seven minutes apart, coming on strong right from the start. I interrupted Spencer’s shower to tell him that it was happening. Yeah - normally I would have waited it out a bit longer, chalking it up to a good probability of false labor, but this time was different. The doctor said that he’d see me in a couple of days, all of the other signs were there. Surely, if contractions started this time, I had all the other bullets on my side to back me up here! My membranes being stripped… All of that nasty crap I keep finding in the toilet… SURELY these factors have some bearing on being able to push me over the edge. I gave Spencer the heads up and warned him that even if he planned to still go into work the next day (which I’d let him do if he really wanted as long as the baby wasn’t crowning) that I’d be waking him up if I needed to. I did my best to fall asleep, planning to be woken up by stronger contractions sometime in another few hours.

Instead I wake up to the 4:00 a.m. alarm. Two contractions before breakfast was done and nothing… not a single cramp to speak of, after that. They say that every woman reaches a point in her pregnancy when she convinces herself that she will be the first woman on earth to never give birth. I’ve pretty much reached that point.

Tiny Dancer

Weeks 38-39

At 36 weeks I made a post about my “first” experience in false labor, purposefully using the word “first” because I knew that if it was my misfortune to have it once, I was likely to have it at least a few more times before the real thing, especially so early on.

And I did. I went into my 38 week appointment with that being the first (mildly spiteful) comment out of my mouth.
Dr.: Hey, there! How are we doing this time around?
Me: Well, if I weren’t planning on laboring mostly at home, I would have headed into the hospital twice this week.
And to my complete surprise, this actually took him a little off-guard. I expected the routine, oh that’s normal. Nothing to get excited about line that OB doctors always seem to have on hand to crush your dreams. But this time, when he checked me I got an enthusiastic, “Oh, Yeah. Look at that. You’re ready to go.”
He stripped my membranes and told me that I’d lose my bloody show as soon as I got home. Honestly I wasn’t even expecting to get an exam this time around. He said that her head was “right there… way, way down there,” and that I was a good 3 centimeters dilated. When he took out my chart to record my progress he commented that we’ve had “big changes since last week,” and better yet, that he’ll be seeing me in the hospital to have this baby before I make it to my next appointment. SCORE!

At my previous appointment I made sure to ask how likely it was that I’d go past my due date a second time around, since I went into overtime with Matthew and wasn’t looking forward to a repeat experience. And damn it all if I didn’t get a very UN-reassuring answer about how because of hormones in the mother that trigger the onslaught of labor, a mother who has an overdue baby once usually keeps that trend with succeeding pregnancies too. So when I came out of this appointment bearing good news, I could have danced out of that office.

Speaking of dancing, I think what probably helped was throwing my friend’s bachelorette party over the weekend. We ended the night with drinks and dancing at the Chesapeake Inn and even though I couldn’t drink and even though I was enormously round (and accordingly off-balance and uncoordinated), I didn’t let that stop me from making just as much of a fool of myself as everyone else! Most of it was just for the fun, but part of it was also a conscious effort to stimulate some kind of labor progress, too. Needless to say Baby Scarlett got a lot of attention on the dance floor -- (except for the one time Linda had to shoo some guy away from dancing up behind me because he couldn’t see that I was pregnant from behind… By far Spencer’s favorite part to hear about the next day!) The next afternoon I had the hardest contractions yet, beginning at regular 7 minute intervals and lasting clear into the early morning hours of the following Monday before finally tapering off.

So, like the doctor promised, I lost my bloody show as soon as I got home - which, as you can imagine was equally disgusting and exciting - and after sharing the good news with my mom, was surprised that night with a brand new car seat from my parents to replace Matthew’s old hand-me-down. The doctor left me with instructions to stay active so I plan to keep the music nice and loud today while me and Matthew keep ourselves on the move, and maybe I’ll even throw in an extra work-out or two. Wish me luck!

My Children

Week 37

Daddy would always wrap him up so tight in that receiving blanket you almost couldn’t believe there was the rest of a real body in there. A beating heart and breathing lungs. Fragile as his newborn body felt in your stare, there was an unassuming, mind-bending power behind that beating heart and growing brain and working organs when you held them in the palm of your hands. The blankets were all still new on the job, crisp and bright out of their packaging. I thought so many times before he was born that I couldn’t wait to use them, but when he was wrapped up I felt robbed of the real thing. I couldn’t get enough of his tender, feeble body in all of it’s living, breathing, being, beauty. Holding him changed me.

When I read to him back then, he had no reaction. His eyes stared in their normal direction and if his brain registered any fascination with the geometry of the illustrations or the rhythmic sound of my voice on the words, nothing gave it away. Sometimes his eyes would get heavy in the middle of the third or fourth story from that night’s feeding and I’d let the words fall over him like a blanket until his breathing told me he was under as far as he could go. It was finally safe to lie him down in his crib and sneak back to bed myself, but sometimes I’d read for just a little longer. I liked to think that I was soothing him to sleep, but I had no way of knowing.

The dies on Scarlett’s blankets could give you paper cuts they’re so crisp and untouched, wrapped up in their white ribbons, still hanging from the clear plastic hangers they hung on in the store. Spencer laughs that I keep leaving the door to her nursery open, teasing that it’s because I can’t stop walking in there, neurotically making sure that everything’s in as perfect, pristine order as it was the last time that I walked in there to check, and to drink it in… the smell of the baby powder, the sound of the wind chime outside of her window, and the kaleidoscope of sunlight dancing into her crib through the beautiful entanglement of tree leaves just beyond her blinds. I love the silks of the ribbons on her crib, and the cotton of her sweaters and the stitching on the noses of her tiny animal toys. And I caught myself thinking just last night that I couldn’t wait to Christen it all with the gentle company of our tiny newborn daughter. I can’t wait to unfold these blankets and tear off these price tags and get down and dirty with being a new parents all over again.

And that’s when it was bedtime for Matthew. Back to reality; Spencer’s shower hisses to a start down the hall and that’s my cue to meet Matthew in his bedroom for story time. Without a hiccup in the schedule, Matthew peeled himself out of the day’s clothes and climbed into bed so that I could put his Pull-Up on under his jams. As I tossed the clothes into his hamper and reached over for his favorite book, he pulled out the orange tin from the cubby of his headboard and fished inside for one of his Binkies. He plugged it into his mouth, nuzzled his waist under the quilt, and folded his arms behind his head, lying in wait for the first page to turn. When I read to him now, he listens to the words like he’s devouring a meal. He reacts with every muscle in his face to every predictable situation I read aloud. The first sentence crosses my lips and it’s hard to reach the next punctuation mark without his interrupting to point and exclaim and repeat what just happened. It’s as if his understanding of what just went down is so much deeper than mine, and he doesn’t want me to fall behind in the plot. His eyebrows catapult from his forehead, his binky bobs to and fro under his button nose, and his fingers point harum-scarum from one corner of an illustration to the next, as he tells each piece of the story back to me before the turning of the page.

Kissing on the wing of an airplane

In the hustle and bustle of raising a toddler, it’s easy to loose sight of how these milestones were reached. When Matthew’s scooping a pile of mashed potatoes into his mouth without getting more of it on his cheeks than on his taste buds, I don’t always take time to remember the many stages of breast milk and cereal concoctions at the highchair that got him there. I just enjoy our more civilized dinner. And when I’m reading to him at bedtime, and he explodes with enthusiasm over every recognizable event he’s had read to him a hundred and forty-two thousand times, I don’t always take time to appreciate how far we’ve come together to make story-time such a magical part of our ordinary everyday. I just enjoy that it is.

In such a very short time I’ll have a newborn nestled into my arm again, taking from my breast and taking from my heart and taking from my stories. We will start from the beginning, where hysterics of expression and laughter don’t give back to every shared experience. We will start from a place where she is just she, delicate and powerful and completely unaware; just trusting and growing quietly in the blanket of my words on her thirsty ears. It’ll be a place sometimes that I won’t be used to, but a place that I can’t wait to rediscover. A place that I can’t wait to let change me all over again.

Psyche!

My experience in false labor
Week 36

Come on, little one.
4:48 a.m.
4:59
5:15
5:27
5:39
5:51
6:02
6:10

This list was not documented for the sake of making a blog entry out of. This list is evidence of my surviving one of the absolute most maddening experiences known to mankind… THIS is my first experience in false labor.

Yeah. I never went through this with Matthew. When I was nine months pregnant with my first child, a contraction, followed by another contraction, followed by another contraction meant that I was in labor. In my expert experience, it meant that in another maybe day and a half I’d be rocking out a baby. And what perfect timing! Spencer wouldn’t even need to take a day off from work to be with me. Man, my luck rocks with this baby, I thought. Let’s do this!

I didn’t feel like I was jumping the gun, either. In fact, I made every effort under the sun NOT to jump the stupid gun. I avidly and mindfully avoided making any kind of movements whatsoever around any kind of firearms at all. But fate has no compassion.

The contractions started like the Braxton Hicks ones always do. My tummy tightened and contorted, shifting Scarlett’s rear end into some kind of position I was pretty sure wasn’t anymore comfortable for her than it was for me. I adjusted myself accordingly in my chair at lunch time while Matthew and I shared some peanut butter and orange slices, licking our fingers and getting our elbows sticky on the table. I waited out the discomfort and realized after about a minute that the contractions today were really starting to get some length to them now. I thought back on the day a little more and realized that I’d had an awful lot of them, too. Still, there was a very noticeable difference between these painless, sort of empty contractions and the ones that gradually sent me to my knees, writhing in pain the day that I went into true labor with Matthew. I didn’t think twice about paying them any mind. But when the next one came on stronger and the next one, just a little bit stronger than that, it became easier to notice that they were coming in pretty regular intervals. I also felt an alarming kind of sensation at the next few contractions… The distinct feeling of (what I’m guessing is probably a baby) pressing down pretty aggressively on some of my lowermost regions. So much so that Matthew took notice of a reactive grimace on my face and asked if I was Okay. At the onslaught on the next one, which sent the first familiar tinge of a dropping kind of pain down the insides of my pelvis, I thought… wait, this might be worth looking into. And just for fun - I told myself - I peeked over at the clock.

And to my surprise, over the next hour and a half, I realized that these contractions which were no longer entirely different from the ones that kicked off my labor the last time, were Honest to God, 20 minutes apart. Every one. No “more or less” about it. So I kept at it… and damned if they didn’t pick up the pace to only 15 minutes apart over the next half hour. Two hours now of regular contractions that are actually getting closer together. Hm. So as nap time settled into clean-up time, and clean-up time turned into laundry time and laundry time wrapped up into early afternoon and a phone call to my mom for confirmation that I’m hopefully not crazy - the contractions kept coming and the time in between them kept shortening.

By the time Spencer came home from work, they were ten minutes apart. I decided not to pounce on him the moment he got in the door with shrieks of our impending parenthood. I decided to take this slowly, knowing that at any moment and without any warning at all, they could just stop and it would all be chalked up to false labor. I waited until dinner time to casually slip him something about how I’ve had regular contractions for most of the day… but that it was still early, so it may not be anything to get excited about. He didn’t. So I didn’t. We finished up dinner and spent a good part of the afternoon leaning over the neighbor’s gate, watching Matthew run around the yard with their dog, while our beagle howled at the commotion from our side of the fence. We talked to the neighbor and laughed at our son, who kept loosing the struggle to keep his pants around his waist while he ran, and I wondered with every contraction how close together they were coming now. When Spencer and I got inside and started working on cleaning up from dinner, I dropped a mixing spoon in the sink and looked at him with a this-is-for-real kind of smile.
“That one was only eight minutes.”

I went to bed, telling him that there was no reason not to go into work the next day… That even though they’d been regular for almost an entire day now, they still weren’t painful yet. It’ll probably take all night for them to really increase in intensity. I’ll probably even be able to sleep most of the night. And even once they get really painful, we might still have another whole day to go. By the time you get home from work tomorrow, things should be rolling along nicely!

And - I AM NOT SHITTING YOU - I woke up in the middle of the night, with unmistakably strong contractions. The exact kind of contractions that I had the morning I woke up in labor with Matthew. I peeked at the clock every 10 minutes with the pain of a new contraction winding my insides from the belly-button down. I woke up the that morning waiting for the next contraction to happen so that I could start making the plans. And when it did four minutes later, I sent a text to my mom.

Still coming. 10 - 14 mins apart. Getting stronger, still pretty mild though.

Today, tomorrow, three weeks from now...

Yeah, it's all the same.

At this point, they weren’t all as strong as the ones I’d had the night before. Some were pretty intense while others weren’t. But I could say that these intense ones were at least double the intensity of the ones I’d considered pretty strong the night before. And you can’t ignore that timeline!

I got up and made arrangements for the kids for that night. I sent Spencer off to work with the promise that I’d let him know how things progressed throughout the day until he got home. He left for work at 4:30, and that is when I started jotting down the times of my contractions in a word document, above. I put Mary to work on a few chores after breakfast and I called a friend over to help me tie up some loose ends around the house. I made a list on the dry erase board of every preparation that would need to be made in the case that today was the last of my days at home without a newborn.

It was a lot of hub-bub for nothing. They died down somewhere around noon that day, gradually getting softer and farther apart until it was hard to notice them at all. I lied down and noticed that they would start to get stronger only to taper off again. Then I’d get up and notice that that triggered a few, too. I could have massaged my stomach, I could have had Spencer bring me home a can of pinapple juice and some spicy Mexican food but I didn’t see the need. She just wasn’t ready. It just wasn’t time. So I reluctantly let it go.

Today it’s hard not to draw too much awareness to my abdomen every time a bit of tension builds up within the walls of my uterus. But I know that if false labor has been my misfortune once, it’s more than likely to happen a time or two again before the real thing. So I’m preparing to hunker down for the long haul with this one, too.