bearing blog

<—–Due date's tomorrow.   Am I awe-inspiring, or what?

I'm glad I have the blog.  Because I'm showing them off, I've taken soooo many more pregnancy photos than I did in pregnancies before I had the blog.  I will be glad to look at this later.

***

At coffee-and-doughnuts after Mass — I am convinced, by the way, that despite energetic catechesis to the contrary, my kids believe that  "doughnuts after Mass" is the eighth sacrament of the Church — a male parishioner came up to me and said, "You know, from behind you, I would never have thought that you were pregnant."

What a nice thing to say to a huge, under-five-foot-tall, lumbering pregnant woman! I thanked him.

My husband had a different take on the comment when I told him about it later.  He laughed.  "I could interpret that on a lot of levels," Mark told me, "but the simplest interpretation was that he was looking at your butt."

I don't care.  It was still nice to hear.  Even if the proper translation is Wow!  I was ogling your backside and then you turned around and you were, like, all MATERNAL and everything!  Kind of like "The Crying Game" only marginally less emasculating.

* * *

Me, last night:

"Argh!  These on-and-off false-labor contractions are weighing very heavily on my… my… my psyche, my id… what is it you call the part of yourself that needs to, you know, plan for stuff and know what's going on?"

Mark:

"What, you mean 'the core of your very being?'"

***

Resolved:  I will not get depressed about "not getting much schoolwork done" and will instead make the kids watch a lot of nature movies and other pseudo-educational DVDs from the library.  Right now they are working their way through four episodes of Popular Mechanics For Kids:  The Science of Extreme Sports.  Up next:  a movie about Rembrandt (I am pretty sure it is the artist, not the toothpaste) and then one about anatomy and genetics.  If I run out of stuff like that, there's always the graphic underground childbirth tape.

***

The more-senior of my two midwives attended 2 births in the 24 hours before my appointment yesterday, so she cancelled it.  I expect she needs some sleep.   So I spent yesterday evening on and off the phone with my other midwife — I am sooooo thankful I was able to have two for this pregnancy — being reassured that I was still having "turning contractions" and that I would, in fact, know when I go into labor.  This whole posterior-baby thing feels so different from my three previous pregnancies that it's really throwing me off.  

I'm kind of glad I had a chance to talk at length to the second midwife last night, even if I was a little alarmed at the two other births happening so close to mine (I didn't think she had any more January babies — the February ones must have showed up early).  The second midwife was apprentice to the first midwife when I gave birth to Milo and to MJ, and it is hard for me not to think of her as "the apprentice" or "the assistant" any more, even though she has been practicing on her own for three years now.   I have tended to think of the senior midwife, who attended all three of my other births (the first with her longtime partner who is now deceased), as the "main" midwife and the younger one as the "back-up" or "assistant" midwife, hired because she lives a lot closer to me and I wasn't comfortable with the risk of delivering unassisted should the perfect storm arise the day I go into labor.  But this is not really fair to her; she is very capable and professional.  (Maybe it's just that she's about my own age, with children close in age to mine!)  I feel much more confident and pleased about having her around to support me now that I've had a chance to lean on her a little bit.    More like that's a positive, good thing, as opposed to something chosen simply because I was fearful that the senior midwife wouldn't arrive on time to help us (it happens…)

Home birth forces the parents to accept the responsibility of birth, and the nature of birth as it is, I think.  But (unless you go the unassisted route, a choice which I do not condemn) there is still a complex interplay of trust between the parents and other support persons.  The mother can trust too much, for sure, become too dependent on external support, external information, and lose that sense of ownership and responsibility.  On the other hand, there must be some level of trust and willingness to depend on the people who are around you.  If that trust can't be mustered, then there's probably something wrong and maybe that person shouldn't be at your birth.  It's such a vulnerable time, even though it is a strong time too.

I have a hypothesis that, as a survival mechanism, a laboring woman instinctively reaches out to use all the resources at her disposal, to use them to their fullest in coping with and surrendering to labor; and instinctively loses her desire for anything she cannot obtain.  What good is pining for people and things you can't have?  

In retrospect, it has seemed that every person who was there during my births was absolutely essential to my well-being.  The labor tub I had in my first birth was absolutely necessary.  In my second birth, when I didn't have it, I didn't need it, didn't even want it.  I think this is part of the reason why, even when they respecting each other's choices, women who have used and enjoyed (say) epidural anesthesia, and women who have never even considered it, have trouble understanding each other.   If I can place medical pain relief physically or mentally out of reach, I literally do not want it.  But it makes sense to me that if it is an option, I might desire it.

This is how strength and vulnerability co-exist:   a perfect, instinctive balance between perception of wants/needs, and the real resources available.  At least that's how I've experienced it.  At few other times in my life have I wanted exactly what I was rightly able to have, no more and no less.

I made the mistake yesterday of googling "posterior labor" and scared myself.  So.  As long as I'm still waiting to go into labor, I figured I might use the time trying to spin the baby around from posterior to anterior.  

Let me digress with a quick review of fetal positioning for anyone who isn't familiar with the terminology, since not a few of the folks I've mentioned this to have thought I meant the baby was breech when I described him as posterior.  Skip this if you know all that.

• "Breech" would mean the baby was head-up, feet- or butt-down, and that is potentially a more serious malpositioning which frequently requires cesarean section and almost always is delivered by c-section these days whether necessary or not.
• "Vertex" is the opposite of breech:  head down, ready to be born headfirst.  You can see why we don't refer to babies as right-side-up and upside-down.  Too ambiguous.   Even when the baby's definitely not breech, he can assume a variety of positions; here is a good diagram showing the possibilities and the abbreviations.  
• "Posterior"  means that the baby is facing the mother's front, not her back.  Yes, posterior means "back."  It's short for "occiput posterior" (sometimes "occipital posterior") which translates roughly to "the back of the baby's head is towards the mother's back.")  Sometimes this is called "sunny-side-up" which, I assume, refers to the way the posterior baby would face at birth if the mother were in the obstetrical semi-sit or on-her-back delivery position, either of which would be a pretty crappy way to deliver a posterior baby.  
• "Anterior," really occiput anterior, is the opposite of posterior:   baby faces the mother's spine, back of the baby's head to the mother's front.

The usual manner of birth is vertex and anterior.  My baby is vertex but posterior.  Most of the time posterior babies turn during labor at some point, though often not until after many hours.  If they don't turn, they do come out that way, but it's more difficult — labor tends to start later and take longer and be more uncomfortable, or at least that's what they say.  

I'm a little anxious about it.  

So I spent some time yesterday crawling around on hands and knees, feeling like I ought to say "Moo" every now and again.  Originally I thought I might use the time constructively by scrubbing the floor or something (it needs it; Mary Jane dumped a box of baking soda on the floor last week and tried to clean it up herself, with a wet mop, before she was discovered), but the hard floor hurt my knees, so I settled for circling the armchair on the area rug.

It's hard not to blame myself for the malpositioning.  I have spent too much time in front of the computer and leaning back in rocking chairs.  I am now sitting in front of the computer perched on the front of a rocking chair to tilt it as far forward as I can without sliding off.  Last night I arranged all the pillows I could find (Mark had to wad a blanket under his head) so I could sleep all night on my left side with my belly button pointed down, or at least as down as I could point it without cutting off anybody's oxygen.  Before that, while Mark was reading stories to MJ and Milo, I spent some more time doing pelvic rocks on hands and knees. 

Oscar, who's nine, peeked around the door with an alarmed look on his face.  "Is the baby coming out?"  I suppose I looked a lot like some of the pictures in the birth books.  I said no and he said "Are you sure?" 

I assured him that, if the baby were in fact coming out, I would know before he would.  After he went back to his bedroom, Mark laughed at me, or maybe at him, and told me I needed to get in the habit of closing the door all the way.   Which is true.

I woke up very achy from sleeping on the same side all night.  

 I guess I can turn my impatience to have the baby into thankfulness that, since he's not quite engaged yet, there's still room for him to turn around.  Think rotational thoughts.  

For Mary Jane, new Girl Sheets for the Girl Bed.

   The hope is that she will be so thrilled with sleeping on pink polka-dot sheets that she picked out herself, that she will not notice that she has been promoted from the position of Sleeping Between Mommy And Daddy In The Big Bed to the position of Sleeping On Daddy's Other Side In The Twin Bed Next To The Big Bed.

And for Baby XY, a dozen one-yard squares of cotton flannel (fifty percent off at JoAnn Fabrics!  Yay!).  Mary Jane picked out the plaid, and I added some swirly blue (shown) and also a swirly red (not shown because it's up in the washing machine with a couple of cloth diapers, testing for colorfastness.)

  There, that should be masculine enough, I think.

I had at least a dozen homemade flannel blankets somewhere, left over from the other babies, but I couldn't find them.  Simple receiving blankets made of squares of flannel are the best thing to have around if you do the skin-to-skin, diaper-free thing for the first few weeks.  Warm, lightweight, and absorbent.  If you have a serger, you can serge the edges, or if you have plenty of time on your hands and a stack of movies to watch you can hem them, or you can be like me and just cut the edges with pinking shears and call it good.  These are only receiving blankets after all.  

That means they are meant to receive a lot of pee. 

They don't need to be fancy.  But you can at least pick pretty fabric when you're lucky enough to walk in and all the flannel is on clearance.  As it was for me today.  Bonus!

Finally, for me, Melissa came through: she found the rice bags she had made for when her little Tad was born two years ago.  So I don't have to make any!  .If I'm getting ready for a posterior labor, I'm guessing I'll want them, and even if labor doesn't turn out to be too difficult, I know I'll need them for the

(everybody cringe now ladies)

afterpains. 

SO.  We're about ready now, baby.  Are you listening?