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.