Anticipation.

These days swing wide, from bursts of sudden energy to collapsing breathless into a chair, from intense longing to hold this baby in my arms and see his face to wide-awake fear in the looming shadow of the coming day of birth.  It's positively crazy — I'll never hold the baby closer than I hold him today inside me, and yet when I put my hand on my belly and feel him moving I think of putting my hand on a pane of glass I can't quite see through.  We will never be so united again and yet I feel that we are more separate now than we will be after his birth.

I went looking today for the photos from the other birth-days.  Oscar's are prints from a film camera, I will have to get down an album to look at those.  I haven't turned Mary Jane's up yet, still have to look on my old laptop.  I found the pictures from Milo's birth on the desktop computer and clicked through them one by one.  We are in the attic bedroom in our old duplex.  It was my own face I wanted to look at, to try to recapture a memory of the post-birth relief and gladness, something to temper the right-now-very-strong memories of mid-labor exhaustion. 

The pictures helped a bit.  In one that won't be posted here (quite NSFW), I hold the towel-wrapped pinkish bluish new baby on my bare knees, the umbilical cord still snaking between us.  My face is unsmiling and slack — it is not a picture of rejoicing, but a picture of total relaxing at the end of the effort — not bubble-bath and good-book relaxing, but end-of-the-race walking-it-off.  I like that picture, though.  It says:  It's over, thank God. 

An even better one that I can share is here:

 Mark is holding baby Milo on his chest while the midwife does the newborn exam.  I am being checked by the apprentice midwife.  My face isn't fully visible, but you can see that I am better, that I am glad, reflected in my husband's face.  I remember that moment or one very close to it, and I am pleased to have the picture. His smile here is a grin that I love dearly.

The newest birth now is only a few weeks away.  My other babies were born in summer and autumn; Mark carried each of them out into the sunlight soon after birth. January, though, will be frigid and snowy and hostile.  I have a few more weeks to feel more ready, thank goodness.  One of the gifts (!) of late pregnancy really is its discomfort.  After a while, I know, I will be ready for it to be over, so that when the pangs come I'll feel anticipation of relief almost as strongly as anticipation of suffering and uncertainty, and that will help get us all through it.

The strongest memory I have from Mary Jane's birth is of knowing I could not push harder, realizing I HAD to push harder (stuck shoulder), and — what do you know — I pushed harder.  It is really quite amazing what one can do when one has no choice.  And that's what is coming up for me:  a day of no choice, a day when all my other plans will be laid aside, because I will have no choice but to labor and birth.

I was so thrilled to be pregnant in the spring, and I'm still enjoying being pregnant, and I'm still grateful.  It's scary anyway.