at long last, i emerge from the fog to dispense random thoughts and advice

Oh, my darlings. It has been far too long. A summary of how I have spent the last three and half weeks includes: applying ice packs to my crotch, being waited on and loved and supported by Manny and my parents and one of my sisters (the other arrives tonight), dealing with sore nipples (that is perhaps the biggest understatement I have ever made), surviving somewhat nice but utterly exhausting visits from well-meaning friends and family, crying tears of gratitude, crying tears of frustration and overwhelm and exhaustion, trying not to nurture the resentful thoughts that pop up when Manny says that “none of us has gotten a solid night’s sleep in the last few weeks” cause I can tell you that his sleeps look pretty damn solid from where I sit propped up and nursing my voracious offspring, showing off this creature with whom I’m more and more in love every day, making up nicknames for C (there are a LOT), and trying to figure out how time has suddenly started moving so damn quickly.

There is more, of course. Much of it is a blur, much of it is a bore, and even the interesting bits are hard to put into words.

I’m still working on the birth story. For now I will just say that I got absolutely everything I wanted in a birth except an intact perineum. I was amazed at how supportive the hospital environment was – everyone involved was completely respectful of my wishes and of this being an important and sacred experience for me and Manny and C, once he emerged. I imagine that having a doula (actually we had two, because we invited a doula who is still in training to attend) helped to send a message that we were prepared to do this our own way, but I really have to credit our nurse and the rest of the staff for just listening to me and mostly just letting me be. Manny was awesome and so were the doulas – they were all quietly supportive and let me do my thing, which is exactly how I had envisioned it beforehand. I had pretty clear instincts about how the birth would go, and that’s pretty much how it went. not that I believe in “the secret” or anything, but I believe that working through things with my doula before the birth really helped me to access my own wisdom about what I needed to birth safely and calmly – that is really the biggest benefit to having had a doula, I think. I remember thinking right after C was born that the doulas didn’t really do very much – like they didn’t talk to me much, or do much physical work of supporting me in different positions, or even touch me all that much. But for me, the important work was all done in advance – it was all heart work, not body work. Damn, I’m grateful for that.

As always, I’m hopeful that I will write more, but reality and past history says that it might be a while. I do want to get the birth story up, but I haven’t completely finished it for myself yet, and I want to do that first before putting it up here. For now I will leave you with my golden pieces of advice – for those of you about to give birth or welcome a little one into your life especially:

• The most golden piece of advice ever – counter-pressure on the perineum while you poop. If you have stitches, pooping may suddenly become the scariest thing ever. This really, really helps. Use a pad or a dampened cloth to press firmly on your stitches while you poop. Go slow, relax your body as much as possible, and keep the pressure on there until you’re done. I don’t know how I would have survived the first two weeks without this trick, honestly. Also, painkillers and stool softeners are your friends.
• Get breastfeeding support lined up before the baby comes – don’t wait for a problem. I don’t know if there are many other people who were as prepared as I was for breastfeeding a newborn, in terms of information and exposure, and still it was rough. We were lucky that C was clearly getting enough milk and I didn’t have to worry about him, but the pain was hard to take at times. In my case, it was a matter of simply getting through it – by two weeks, I was healed and it got a lot easier. But if I hadn’t had people to turn to with my questions, it would have been hard to keep going. So if you want to breastfeed (and by no means am I saying that you have to), build that network early and don’t be shy about using it if you need to. Breastfeeding is natural, but it is hard work and sometimes it is just plain hard.
• Accept all offers of help. Every single one. Every gift, every meal, every offer to walk the dog, every offer to do housework. Every single one. Okay? And if you are not getting offers, ask. Because this caring for a fresh human being is hard, hard work. Joyful and wonderful and gratifying, but undeniably hard.
• Sleep when the baby sleeps – it is harder than it sounds. Because you want to do something fun or useful when the baby sleeps. Just one more load of laundry. Just a few more pages of this great book. And soon, your baby is awake. If you can’t sleep, just lay down and rest. Really. It helps to make up for the times (hopefully there are not many) when you need to spend 20 minutes pooping and your baby is screaming.

Alright, dear ones. That is all for now. In light of my last piece of advice, I will go and enjoy from a horizontal vantage point the sleeping baby who is currently strapped to my chest.

Oh, and here are some photos. Love you all and my infinite thanks for all your comments and sweet messages of welcome. You are shining stars, every single one of you.

about twelve hours old

three weeks, two days old with fluffy, post-bath hair

Welcome to the world!

Charles Soren was born on November 2 at 3:03 a.m., weighing 7lbs 9 oz. We call him Charlie and we are utterly besotted with him. The birth was wonderful and I am so proud of myself – details to follow at some point when I am up to doing more than being in love and taking it very easy.

Thanks to each of you for all your love, thougts, prayers, and support. You all mean so much to me.

Still waiting

Yup, still waiting. My doula says I sound too cheerful to be on the verge of labour, but I am feeling that coming to an end with each passing day. I am ready to meet the wee bit and get on with living the life I’ve been dreaming about and working towards for so long. Not to mention getting a break from the 8 or so pounds of baby that is currently pressing on my pelvis. Oy!

Not in labour

That is all – will write more later. Oh, and run, do not walk, to your nearest cinema to see “Where the Wild Things Are.”

state of the, er, cervical nation

Never thought I’d be putting this kind of info out to the entire world, but weird things happen when you are 38 weeks pregnant. According to my doctor, I am 3 cm dilated and 80% effaced. But I am not in labour. I learned that I need to include that with the previous info, cause I think I got my doula all excited, and my mother called while I was out at acupuncture, all in a tizzy. I pretty much need to make “I am not in labour” the subject line of all emails from here on out, and use it as my standard greeting when making a phone call. So while there is significant progress towards us meeting the wee bit, and it could happen any time now, it is not happening right this minute.

However, I am very, very excited. And a bit nervous and freaked out, because I don’t feel ready. My house is not the spotless shining bastion of coziness that I want it to be when I come home with a floppy newborn. You can bet that I will be working on that tomorrow, and for however many days we have left before we get to meet this little human. And also – can one ever be completely ready for a change this big? I sort of doubt it. It’s just too big for my hormone-drunk brain to fathom.

where has the time gone?

Napping, cooking, swimming, cleaning, preparing, processing, erranding, meeting with my doula, spending time with Manny. And napping.

Dear me, I think this may be a record for time between posts. So much for thinking that once I was off work, I would write more. Partly I’ve been cocooning myself as much as possible, preparing the space in my heart for what is about to happen to my life, to our life. It has taken all this time to bring some of the heavier stuff to light. I tend to work that way – the sign of a true introvert, I think – in that I just need a lot of time alone doing what feels right in the moment, not pushing anything too hard, not journalling, or thinking, or analyzing, but instead just being. And then insight will come, and things will shake loose, and the way will open up.

And the insights have come, finally. For the entire pregnancy until this week, I wasn’t feeling anything about the donor issues except gratitude and happiness that we were finally getting our chance. But on some level, I think I was always waiting for things to flare up, knowing there were things that were not completely resolved or at least that there are parts of this journey we have yet to make our way through. More the latter, really – that this is going to be a lifelong journey for us as a family. Not to say that I think it’s going to be a problem or a struggle – because I really don’t believe that – but more that our having used donor sperm to create this baby is part of our story as a family now.

So this week I’ve done a little bit of opening up to what this means to me right now, and I guess what I’ve discovered is that I have some fears about how we will connect as a family of three. In my heart of hearts, I have a lot of faith that all will unfold beautifully and that we will figure it out together with ease and grace. But there are still questions there, some vulnerability, some fear. I don’t know if it’s the hormones or a sign of my tremendous spiritual growth (the hormones, almost certainly!) but for right now, once I was able to see all of this with some clarity and could find words to express all of it, I feel really at peace with the vulnerability. I don’t need to figure it all out now or have any more certainty that it will all work itself out.

I’ve also got some anxiety about how we will handle the secret/not-secret of this baby’s origins. Lots of people close to us know, but lots don’t. I’m not sure how long that will be sustainable, but at the same time, I’m quite sure that certain people will be better off not knowing and that Manny and I and the baby will be better off with them not knowing. It just feels weird to go into this time of excitement and anticipation and joy and openness and vulnerability without being completely honest. Because I am so explosively proud of us, of our decision, of how we have worked through it all so far, and most of all, of this new life who will be joining us soon. And a secret just doesn’t seem to fit with all that right now.

Within a few weeks, my mind will be otherwise occupied and fussing over these questions will be put aside for a while. Which is fine, because there is no rush to figure them out. It feels good to know that – that I don’t have to make peace with every single part of this process before we can move forward. I remember realizing that around the time we were making the decision to pursue DI, and it is good to remember it now.

How’s by all of you? Anything you’re feeling peaceful about at the moment?

catching up

Dudes, I seriously need to set aside a specific time each week to write. So much to say, so many thoughts and observations, so much I want to remember – all evaporated because I can’t seem to settle down enough to actually put the words together and record them. It is frustrating to be so flighty. And also so sleepy by the end of the day that I just immerse myself in TV or books or phone calls to my family.

However, next Wednesday is my last day of work, so hopefully having my days free will help me make the time. I really, really hope so.

Where to start – perhaps a list of pregnancy stuff that I want to remember? Because I know you are all just wetting yourselves to hear about the minutiae.

• Still feeling good, mostly. Have battled some crazy insomnia but it seems to have settled down the past week or so. It is horrible to be awake in the middle of the night for three hours and then have to go to work and pretend to be a normal human. I know it is just a harbinger of things to come, but it really, really sucks when you miss out on sleep. The worst part for me is just feeling like my entire body aches, even my eyeballs.
• I am amazed at my belly and I am in love with it. I could stare at myself in the mirror all day, truly. Manny must be getting tired of my nightly exclamations of how big my belly has gotten, but I am not. I’m trying to enjoy this time because I am in serious denial about what’s going to happen to my body afterwards – I don’t have a single stretch mark yet even though my skin is prone to them, and this helps feed the denial. Like, “Maybe I just won’t get stretch marks and my belly will just spring back to normal after a few weeks. I’ve seen it happen!” I have seen it happen, but it is absurd to think I might be one of those women. I normally wear a B-cup and I have stretch marks on my boobs from when they first sprouted – doesn’t bode well for the belly, which is significantly larger than a B-cup.
• At my doctor’s the other day I was measuring 30 cm even though I was at 34 weeks at the time. He told me not to worry as he said the baby’s head is very low in my pelvis and that some babies just engage in deep pelvic diving expeditions earlier than usual. So I’m trusting him and not worrying. Mostly. I’ve definitely been feeling twinges and jolts in my pelvis which I think is stretching and loosening, and there has been a lot of sensation way down low where he said the head is.
• My weight gain is good (i.e. right on the average) overall, although it has slowed in the third trimester, I think. It was during the second when I was constantly starving that I packed on the most pounds – now I can’t eat as much at once so that helps control things quite a bit.
• Fruit – how I love thee! Truly, I’ve never eaten this much fruit in my entire life. I tend to be fairly picky about fruit and only like what’s really in season – in the winter here, that means basically nothing other than tropical fruits. So I generally don’t eat much of it. But the BC fruit this year has been amazing – peaches, nectarines, apricots, pears, apples, cherries. I’ve frozen a lot of things for use over the winter – Manny was given a vacuum-sealer food thingy for his birthday and I am in love with it. I froze a case of peaches, a bunch of plums, and the few nectarines I managed not to eat.  It will be wonderful to be able to have peaches on my waffles in the middle of winter, or make a plum kuchen to munch on while I nurse my baby.
• I was starting to worry that Manny was freaked out by the presence of a moving, living human in my midsection because we hadn’t had sex in quite some time. But, uh, the other night dispelled all worry. And how!
• Have had some episodes of what I think are low blood pressure – no fainting, but feeling dizzy, woozy, weak and slightly nauseous. My blood pressure is always on the low side but a few weekends back I was really feeling like crap. What clued me in that it might be my BP was that I was insatiably thirsty. And I really mean insatiably – I generally drink at least 2 liters of water a day, and that day I was pretty much drinking constantly, downing pint glass after pint glass and never feeling satisfied. So I did some googling and found that it can be a symptom of low BP- essentially, dehydration and heat (it has finally been summer here this month) can cause your pressure to drop. For me I’m guessing that it just dropped slightly but it was enough to give me symptoms – when I checked it, it was 99/68 which is just slightly lower than it usually is. An interesting piece of information to have about my body, though, and I’ve read that epidurals are not tolerated well by people with low BP so, yet another reason to try to avoid one.
• Blah, blah, blah. Bored yet? Not me.
• We have hired a doula and have our first official meeting with her next week. She is awesome.
• I have attended a La Le.che League meeting – it was sort of weird and sort of great. I didn’t learn too much because my mom was a LLL leader when I was growing up, so I’ve been around this info my whole life and much of it has just sunk in. But it is great to know where to go for both general support and very specific questions and suggestions. If you are hoping to breastfeed and haven’t connected with your local LLL chapter, I highly recommend it. I was a bit worried about feeling like the lone infertile in the room, but then again I always worry about that when delving into that mommy world, and really, I’m kind of used to it. I shared my standard line that it took us a long time to get pregnant and a woman with a baby afterwards actually brought it up when we were chatting after the meeting. Not in a nosy way – she just asked whether we had difficulty conceiving. I said yes and left it at that – I need to prepare the next more detailed response because I tend to get flustered when I think people are pressing me for details, and I don’t want to spill the entire story. Sometimes I good at giving a vague but truthful answer, and sometimes I just don’t know what to say. I guess I’ll get lots of practice – I really do like to be open about the fact that it was not a simple process for us. People need to know that it happens, you know?
• We are taking prenatal classes and have been to two of them now. They are really great – based on the book “Birth.ing Fr.om Wi.thin,” which I cannot recommend highly enough. It’s probably not for everyone, but for me the focus on mindfulness and trusting my own instincts really feels right to me. I’m just not a planner or rehearser – more information often overwhelms me, and since I have a fair bit of experience (through yoga and meditation) with just working with whatever happens in the moment and moving towards those things, even if they are uncomfortable or painful, this approach just fits with me. Manny has rocked my world with his openness and participation in the class – it has been a really good way to connect on this stuff, which I’ve really struggled with throughout the pregnancy. Partly because he was away for 4 weeks this summer, and partly because we just sometimes struggle to find ways to connect and understand each other, and I get to feeling alienated and worried. Having a bit of structure around how we connect is good for us. Must remember that.

There is more, but I’m going to just hit publish now instead of saving this to work on it later. It is nearly time for me to leave work – my boss left a bit early and although I was slightly irritated at that decision, it meant I had the opportunity to write this post, so ultimately, I suppose I must thank him.

I hope to write more about this in future posts, but for now I will just say that I really, really love you, my dear readers. This community has been so good to me and even when I’m not writing, I am reading and commenting (although I am shamefully behind on things this week) and thinking of you all every single day. And it sustains me, knowing you all. So thanks.

grump/gratitude

I am just a grump today. I am feeling overwhelmed with everything, and every time I turn around, something new seems to piss me off. Healthcare debates in another country are completely pissing me off. The news, which I need to just quit watching altogether like a Jeho.vah’s Witn.ess, is pissing me off and upsetting me deeply. The fact that I get slightly out of breath walking up a single flight of stairs. The demands of caring for aging family members on both Manny’s and my sides of the family. The difficulty of making healthy meals that I feel like eating. My sisters and parents all living far away. Waddling. Feeling completely and utterly unprepared for this baby. Feeling misunderstood. People telling me I need to get more exercise so that I’ll have stamina in labour, when they have no fucking idea how much exercise I’m actually getting, and just want to boss me around cause they think it’s their right, nay, their duty, to boss around the pregnant. Seemingly needing to be in charge of everything. The looming anxiety that finally getting the only thing I’ve wanted my whole life might not bring me perfect happiness, that I will still be my muddled, imperfect, striving self once I have this baby.

Ah, yes, that’s it.  Mighty uncomfortable, the truth.

And yet, and yet…tiny spiderweb-thin strands of light in the midst of it all. Gratitude that I can even see this truth, after nearly 36 years, finally. That it does appear that I am, in fact, about to get the one thing I have wanted my whole life. That I have the luxury to stew and cry about my feelings instead of matters of simple survival, like the vast majority of people in the world. That there are many people plus one dog who love me and want to be near me, grumpy or not. That this whole list of complaints, too, shall pass.

Still, a couple margaritas (have I mentioned yet that I’ve had a strange craving for margaritas this entire pregnancy, and I’m not even really that into tequila?) would be quite nice right now. Or a fucking crate of doughnuts. Or something, you know, to let me off the hook of doing the hard work of simply noticing what is going on, right now, in this still uncomfortable moment.

umm, a bit early for announcements?

Just read that Ce.line Dio.n is pregnant and due in May.  Yes, that’s right – she’s roughly 5 minutes pregnant. You’d think an IVF vet like herself might be slightly more circumspect about announcing the good news to the world. Especially since that girl is going to need to start eating about an entire cow’s worth of protein every day to sustain her own life, let alone anyone else’s.

Sheesh.

heavy sigh

Dudes. So much has been going on here and I’ve had neither the energy nor the time to write about it. It’s been a rough week with some good parts – so let’s recap, shall we?

As background info, Manny is quite a bit older than I am, so his folks are in their 70s. His mom has some unnamed form of dementia – she still remembers who we all are and functions in daily life to some extent, but is unable to do things on her own like shop, cook meals every day, etc. She has also, in the 9 years that I’ve known her, undergone some personality changes – she can get quite anxious and is just a bit more abrasive and short tempered. Not abusive or out of control, but she can be unpleasant, especially when she is under stress. Her short term memory is basically shot, although sometimes she surprises me – she seems to remember things with an emotional component the best, so she remembers stuff like that I am knocked up. My father in law is still fairly sharp mentally, but physically is a bit frail and has slowed down significantly since he had a T.IA a couple years ago. Since my MIL is not really able to do things on her own, he has taken over a lot of the day to day stuff, like preparing meals, feeding the cat, etc. All of that combined with living with a person with dementia equals some serious stress, which I think has contributed to the state of affairs we now find ourselves in, or at the very least is something we have to work on alleviating in the future.

Last week Manny had been keeping in touch with his folks who move out to their cabin at the lake for the summer, and learned that his dad had come down with a nasty sounding stomach bug. He was keeping in touch and making sure that things were going along ok – our brother in law was headed out there for his vacation, so we knew that they would have someone around to check on them and help if need be. On Friday, Manny was speaking to them again and decided to head out to the lake immediately, because his dad had had a minor fall when he was feeding the cat – nothing broken or seriously injured, but he was very weak and not walking very well at all. Both FIL and MIL sounded extremely stressed and both wanted to move home (over a two hour drive from the lake to the city where they live) which was a big sign that all was not well – usually, we have to tear my MIL away as she really likes it out there. So off Manny went. I figured he’d be out there for the weekend and that all would be figured out shortly. Um, no.

They got moved home ok, but it quickly became clear that they couldn’t manage on their own. Manny had booked two weeks off work for his summer vacation, so at least he had the time off, but he has been staying with his folks ever since last Friday. I saw him on Sunday when we drove out to the lake to pick up the IL’s vehicle which had been left behind in the hasty move, and we had a chance to talk about how things were going. Basically, this incident has shown us how much more support they really need, and how if my FIL is unable to get around or keep on top of things in the house, that they are unable to live on their own. Right now, we think that a combination of having meals brought in, possibly some home care, and family support will let them stay in their house for a while, provided my FIL keeps getting his strength back, which seems to be happening, although very slowly. I’ve had a sense that this was coming for a while, and actually tried to push everyone to have this discussion a few years back when FIL had the TI.A. But they didn’t, really, and it gives me no satisfaction to be right. Now my MIL is going to be much less able to cope with change, and they have a lot fewer choices than they did back then. We are just starting to investigate what is available in terms of support and in terms of alternative living arrangements for them, but it is scaring the living shit out of me and, I suspect Manny, his sister and her husband. Whatever change is coming is most definitely not going to be easy on any of us.

Some of you may know that Manny had just returned from being away on a work trip for 2 weeks, and now he is gone for another two weeks helping care for his folks. I know that sometimes I come across all calm and zen and generous, because, you know, I try to come across that way. The reality is that I spent last weekend and the earlier part of this week having a complete fucking wallow in my misfortune, because I’m pregnant, damn it, and want to be the center of attention, and have my husband around to talk baby stuff with, and have people fuss over me, and be all princess-y and shit. Instead, I’m stuck in charge of a messy house, a dog that needs walking, and a hungry and extremely fucking weepy beast that needs feeding at 3 hour intervals. Oh, right, I am that beast.  A self-pitying, anxious, teary, and fatter-assed-by-the-day beast.

It took me a few days, but I’ve mostly snapped out of it. The self-pity and anxiety at least. I realized on one of my and Lucky’s morning walks (although they are scarcely walks anymore – I’ve taken them to calling them “our morning toddles”) that I don’t have to carry around the whole enormity of the situation with Manny’s folks – all the what ifs were making me crazy and miserable. Right now, I have to cope with the fact that I’m living on my own, and I need to be as supportive to Manny as I can. I can handle that, even if I’m finding it hard sometimes. All the rest of it – what comes next? what are we going to do? – I can just put down for now. One thing at a time and all that.

Manny and I had tickets to the folk festival that weekend, but he ended up skipping the whole thing. I went with friends to the evening shows – Iron & Wine was great, although marred by the idiots who kept talking all the way through. I went up to the front for my favourite song, and there was a clueless girl behind me who would not shut up and was sadly ignorant of how ridiculous she was being. The whole time, she was going on and on about how much she respected musicians, how she was, like, in awe of them, and how, if she ever had the good fortune of dating a musician, she would just worship him, because, like they are so amazing, how they can play instruments and stuff. Meanwhile, not 30 feet away is a particularly brilliant musician, singing a particularly powerful and moving song, and she can’t find it in her to shut her fucking yap. It was all I could do not to just turn around and stare at her – she was like one of those hilariously oblivious people out of a Jane Austen novel. It makes a good story, but it sort of ruined the magic of the moment.

There is more, of course – I have been having deep, deep thoughts that I would like to write about some day when life returns to some semblance of normal. I am nearly 29 weeks, I’ve hired a doula, I’m feeling good most of the time, although today when I was getting my hair cut I was subjected to the unpleasant sight of my thighs in gaucho pants sitting down. You know how usually when you get your hair cut you need to put on extra makeup and make sure your face isn’t too hard to look at? Yeah, today, I could not have cared less about my pale and exhausted-looking face. Once I caught a glimpse of those thighs…unflattering.

I’m making progress on the baby’s room and am finding myself unexpectedly wanting to do more to decorate it. I am essentially anti-nursery (for myself, not others) because we plan to co-sleep and because, well, babies don’t care what their rooms look like. But I’m finding myself wanting to make it a nice space for myself – likely, this will be limited to sewing a different cushion cover for the rocking chair I got a while ago and perhaps some snazzy wall decals. Maybe a nice little table for a glass of water and snacks for nursing time. Basically, a sitting room for me that happens to contain a dresser for baby clothes and somewhere to put diapers.

I promise more fun stuff soon – photo of my glasses will be possible now that my cold sore is gone, with the added bonus of my fresh haircut. I know, I know – you can’t wait.