Waiting for baby

I just finished reading a book given to me by my mother-in-law and librarian called Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother. It was the perfect book to read as this 9 month cooking session comes to a close. The book is a reproduction of the author's (Beth Ann Fennelly) correspondences with a former student who is expecting a child. She tells stories, offers advice and muses about her own experiences as a mother of a young child. This book is especially poignant for me considering my particular situation. In one of the last chapters, she responds to her friend's confession that she is afraid of the pain of labor. Despite my joking comment in my last post that "staying pregnant is more frightening than the pain of labor", I find that I am fearful of this event. The author speaks the fact that some books call labor pain "discomfort" and how utterly innacurate it is to use such a descriptor. Instead, she offers what I found to be inspirational advice:

"You are a warrior. You are a warrior, and for your whole life you body as been warming up for this great fight. These months have been consumed with training everything inside you, all of the hormones and the loosening of the joints have been in preparation for this and you are ready. You know, more or less, the day, the place, of your battle, and you will meet it because you are destined for it, it is the greatest challenge your body will every know. Oh we women needn't play at war and its games like men I've known who can't disguise their aggression and excitement when the bombs begin falling on some country or other. We needn't play at war because if we give birth, we go to war, and at the deepest level, deeper than bone-deep, our evolutionary history tells us that it's a matter of life or death."

Why I find it comforting to think of labor as "going to war", I'm not sure. But, I found comfort in this passage and in the fact that it is only way that we will get to see our baby at last!!!

These past few weeks do feel like a bit of a waiting game. I'm not working much and I have taken up sewing (who would have thought this would have ever happened). I am feeling rather domestic which is a scary concept for me. I am comforted by the reminders of my former life such as my running shoes and cute shorts and my bike (oh how I miss my bike). I will go back to that. My abdominal girth will not always remain 42 inches (true measurement). I will go back to playing outside and being told to slow down as I am walking/moving too fast. I miss that part of me. But, I am also excited about the addition to our lives...this challenge that we have created and that we will welcome when he/she decides the time is right!!!

I must get back to napping.
wendy