Yesterday I went for my morning swim and found myself unable to complete it. It started out alright, but then I did 100 yards of my (admittedly very poor-form) breaststroke and — Owwwwww!
The round ligament pain has begun.
Also I couldn't swim three strokes without gasping for breath. Pregnancy seems to be catching up with me. We'll see if I can give it a run for its money, after I start taking some more Floradix.
***
I had my first appointment with the midwives this morning, at seventeen and a half weeks. Mark came along, of course, and (while I was in the bathroom peeing on the sticks) I could hear him regaling them with stories of my ice cream cravings. You see, I called him at work to ask him to pick up ice cream on the way home. Twice! And once I specifically asked for strawberry, which is not all that unusual, but the other time it was rocky road. I haven't eaten rocky road in about 25 years.
I happen to hate lying still for the fetoscope, and the midwife knows this, and she had the Doptone all ready for me, so I finally got to hear the baby's heartbeat. I hadn't been consciously worried, exactly, but it was so good to hear that familiar whooshing sound. I haven't felt any movement yet — I tend to be late in "quickening" — and it was good to finally get a sort of external affirmation, that yes, there's somebody in there, really.
Until that baby starts to move, makes that human contact — I may intellectually know that there is a new person in there, but it's hard to feel as if it's true. Instead pregnancy feels like something that is happening entirely to me, like a condition I have. Only after I can feel that person exercising his or her limbs, hiccupping, moving, does it begin to feel like what it really is (and has been all along) — a relationship.
Technology has taught us so much in the last few generations about what's going on in the womb from the earliest days of pregnancy. It's so obvious in the pictures now, what we're seeing. Genetics, the understanding of how the chromosomes come together in the very first moments to create the individual out of what was before only pieces of other individuals, make it so plain, there really is a real person there from the very beginning. Yet it's not hard to understand why, lacking that knowledge, people used to think of "quickening" as the beginning. That is when I make contact, that is when I feel myself capable of the beginnings of love.
To feel oneself capable of love, thank God, isn't a prerequisite for actually being capable. But it's easier after that.
bearing blog 