I made a pact with my husband that we would have a baby by the time I was 30. It's amazing that we followed through on that. After all, we were on a working holiday, living in Montreal for the summer and looking forward to another ski season in Revelstoke, BC when we decided to make this happen. I wasn't pushing for it, but I had alluded to the fact that 30 was approaching fast. I think he was ready too.
Now we're back in New Zealand and living in Queenstown, despite the fact that both our families are in Auckland. For us this was a compromise between the will to stay in Canada and ski the Rockies again and the will to be close our friends and families and to bring up a child back home. Queenstown has the mountains and it's a lot closer than Canada. I think we made the right decision, although so far the employment factor hasn't exactly come to the party. We'll get there.
My baby dreams started a long time before the age of 30 loomed, a long time, even, before I met my husband. In fact, I used to have a bit of an obsession with the idea of having a baby of my own, even when I was not far from being a child myself. As a teenager, the thought would pass through my head that if only I would be one of those people who accidentally became pregnant. The reality of the experience was not something I considered seriously, it was just a fantasy, something to do with being important and different from everybody else, with having someone relying on me.
As a young child, I used to actively look for abandoned babies on doorsteps and in parks, swaddled in blankets and tucked into baskets, the fairytale variety. I think that fantasy had more to do with my overactive imagination than a will to have a real child to look after, or perhaps it was a symptom of being the youngest of four, with a fairly large gap in ages between me and my siblings. Maybe I was lonely.
When I think of teenage girls experiencing what I am going through now, the complete mindf##k that being pregnant can be, I can't imagine how they deal with it. They must grow up incredibly fast. Or is it that I am at an age where the concept of having a baby growing inside me feels deeper and more complex than it would at 16. Maybe the 16-year-old just takes it as it comes and doesn't become terrified, as I did in the first trimester, of all the complications that could arise, of the possibility of miscarriage, and most importantly, of the fact that once it's done, there is no going back.
There is a stage in labour called transition, where the woman reaches an emotional brick wall, where the pain must increase in order to decrease, where she must push through to get it done. This is how I felt in the early weeks of pregnancy too. There was a sense of being trapped, of having physically sealed the door behind me - once it's in there, it can only grow bigger - this, despite the fact that I really wanted the baby. How must a teenager feel when the baby is a mistake but she can't go through with an abortion? You can't get much more trapped than that. If you're reading this and you've gone through it, post a comment and let me know how you dealt with it.
The weeks of uncertainty and panic that followed the appearance of those blue lines on the little stick in that bathroom in Montreal vanished with the end of the first trimester. Hormones stopped racing around quite so vigorously and everything became more manageable, almost overnight. Now that we're heading towards the finish line, my life seems rosy. I have a lot of time on my hands and I take pleasure in spending time in the baby's room, in folding his little things away and in dreaming about what he will look like.
I am careful to adjust my fantasies, to keep an eye on the reality of having a baby with me 24/7, because I know it's going to be hard. I've heard so many mothers say 'no one told me it would be so hard!' to the point where that sentence is cliche. People tell me all the time how hard it's going to be, I have no qualms about that. But, I also know it's going to be beautiful and amazing and worth the pain and sleepless nights and worry and lack of free time and everything else, because once I see him, I will love him even more than I do now.
These seven weeks are hurtling by and I bet when they're over I will wish I had them back, but for now, all I can do is encourage them to rush by, because I can't wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment