Pregnancy Week 30

Right now I’m supposed to be caught between fear and excitement around the birth. But mostly I feel contentment, especially when I’m having a good day and I manage miraculously to parade my bump in public and act and feel like a normal expectant mum. I realised I haven’t been focussed on a momentous event in the near future for years now. I’m still living in the day to day troughs and peaks and minor cataclysms that are ME as much as ever. So my feelings about the birth and imminent motherhood are dictated by the state of my body. Sometimes it feels robust and able to cradle this little kicking creature and sometimes my back, abdominal and pelvic muscles have so completely buckled under the strain of her that even turning over in bed is a challenge.

It seems that when I’m good, I’m surprisingly good but when I’m bad I’m dreadful.

I don’t think I feel the fear that normal, healthy women feel. At least not in the same way. It isn’t a daunting, terrifying prospect for me to surrender my body to this biological clock that’s ticking away until the day it decides to rip me open and deliver the next generation. I live with the terrifying, annihilating force of biology stopping me in my tracks every day. I’m used to its stealth and its wily tenacity over my willpower. I’m used to utter powerlessness and to paralysis overcoming me in a matter of hours. I’m not used to pain to anything like the degree it will hit me. But I don’t feel too scared of it because I just can’t imagine it very well.

So I don’t think I’ll suffer the wait like normal women do once they’ve stopped working and find themselves sitting at home. Sitting at home and waiting are perfectly normal for me.

I am concerned about getting the right answers from consultants about the epidural I’m planning to have and my stay in the hospital after the birth. I want to ask about nutrition during the labour to keep my strength up (their policy doesn’t allow you to eat once you’re in labour); whether I’ll be able to lie on a ball with the epidural, and other burning questions I keep formulating and then forgetting in my panic! Once a coping strategy is sketched out to cover various eventualities I’ll feel ready to embrace the wait.

Yesterday my body felt like a cocoon coming to the end of its function, starting to disintegrate under the strain. But I’m so proud of my placenta! I have to keep going to scans every 3 weeks because our baby is small and we see the blood pressure and oxygen levels to my womb pulsing away on the computer screen to perfection. Im proud of my lungs and veins that are holding up and providing a perfect survival capsule for our baby. I’m proud of my heart. Despite its increasing fatigue and strain it has adjusted to supporting the two of us and I can still climb a few stairs and walk short distances. I’m proud that my hormones are behaving, keeping my baby inside me where she’s safest and where I can give her complete care 24 hours a day. (At least for now). We’ve been at loggerheads, me and my body, for so long. I’m deeply grateful to it for behaving in such an exemplary fashion now it’s come to the crunch.