Waiting.

Baby’s kicking hard this morning.  Maybe it’s all the coffee I had.  Each successive pregnancy (this is #3, for those of you who haven’t kept count), I’ve felt more movement.  I suspect it’s because my abdominal muscles have gotten progressively more lax. 

This time, the sensations remind me of the feelings of going into early labor:  the suddenness of each bump, thump, or rollover; the take-your-breath-away; the downright weirdness of a pulling or stretching or shoving feeling that comes from inside my own guts, for pete’s sake.   A few of the sensations are the same ones that do accompany labor:   twinges from the cervix are unmistakable and very familiar.  And of course, if the baby kicks and punches for more than a few minutes, he or she stimulates my uterus to contract, at this stage painless, but startling.

And each time it reminds me, I think something different.  I am not ready to do that again, sometimes.  Or Here it comes.  Not much longer now. Better GET ready.  Or that ominous knowledge that it’s going to come, and I don’t get to choose when, it chooses for me. 

It’s not all looming-doom kind of feelings, fortunately.  There’s also a peculiar, remembered excitement.  Sometimes these big kicks trigger memories of those days when the contractions started to get more regular and we wondered if this is it.  Like the day (two days before The Day) when we thought #2 would surely arrive, and we pulled out the boxes of birth stuff and got them all ready and went shopping for labor food, me leaning every few steps, breathing, on the handle of the cart.  That day was a sunny, breezy Sunday, and Mark was home, and our little boy, who’s now our bigger boy, was cheerful, and we spent the afternoon taking a long walk to the playground to see if we could revive the contractions that had petered out.   It was a lovely day, even though it wasn’t the birth day.  It still had that secret excitement of knowing that it’s all starting up and that I’ll meet the new little one soon.

Couple that with thankfulness that I don’t have to get ready to go to the hospital, a feeling best compared to the rare opportunity of going for a bike ride at 6:30 on a cool weekday morning, particularly that moment when I get to ride across the pedestrian bridge that crosses I-35W at 40th St., sailing in a gentle arc over the noisy, jammed rush-hour traffic on my way to the paths that ring Lake Harriet. 

Anyway, I’ve still got several weeks to go, but sometimes it feels very far away and sometimes very close.   And sometimes that feels scary, even though (because?) I’ve done this twice before, but other times it feels like it can never get here soon enough.