Overdue

Well, I'm 10 days overdue. To have a baby. I'd really like to blame the baby because that's my parenting philosophy but he's been heads down seven up for months now. I'm pretty sure he's just as annoyed as I am that this is taking so long. We're passengers on a road trip that has lost its romance. We're tired of touching and we've heard all each other's stories. Joanna Newsom's sad crone voice is on repeat with that line of hers, "And I am progressing abominably."Well that and the line about slow low flying turkeys. If you've ever seen one, it's impressive and surprisingly graceful but you're also fairly concerned that it will fly right into a tree. I walked up Phinney Ridge to the bakery Fresh Flours and felt a little obscene. My belly is so big and the baby is riding so low that walking is less like a waddle and more like two halves of two different people not quite going the same direction. And I can't tell you how disorientating it is to sit down in a seat that seemed ample only to be encased in it in such a way that claustrophobia and a strange desire for sausage ensue. And not only that but there is some serious man spreading that goes on. I suppose this could make me more sympathetic about men and their sticky sensitive balls, but really I just think about how there is a human head in my pelvis and I'll be damned if I'm going to squish it to make my legs sit at a space saving angle. And there is no comparison between a human head and balls. I don't give a shit about your balls, men.

If things don't get going, then my induction date is this Sunday at 8 pm. It's nice that there is an end date in sight but getting induced sounds awful. I mean maybe I'll be lucky and they will only have to do a couple things and my body will take it from there. But there is also the chance that they could have to just keep pushing me along which I'm pretty sure is as uncomfortable as that sounds.

But besides my little tirade about men's balls just now, my mood hasn't been terrible. I mean there are definite moments of feeling irritable and hopeless because my body is so tired of carrying all this weight and being hot and having everything ache. But for the most part I'm just really bored. And a little lackluster. I don't really want to hang out with people, I just want to stay home and wait, like a Mama cat under a porch. My brain has started to atrophy just a little. I've watched a lot of TV including catching up on the show Damages. It's that lawyer drama with Glen Close and Rose Byrne. It's really good but it's a little intense. Although I kind of figured out that the music was the most intense thing about it. Well that and the repeated scene of the fiance dead in the bathtub with his head all smashed, the Statue of Liberty bookend all bloody with his hair tangled in the torch on the floor. Yesterday or the day before that I remembered something I had read about how women have evolved for their labor to stop if they were in danger so they could run away and find somewhere safer to give birth. I gave my belly a nice pat and said, "It's just a show." But just in case that wasn't enough, I've taken a hiatus from scary shows.

And in fact, I've decided that I need to tap into whatever the opposite of fight/flight is. The hypothesis being that if danger can stop labor, surely safety/confidence/positivity could initiate it? If your like me, and you hear the word, "positivity" you feel twitchy with the desire to insult someone. It's a dumb word conjuring up TV portrayals of New Age loons who are severely out of touch. But the backbone of it--the quality of being positive, seeing what kind of upside there is--is something I deeply believe in. And I also partly believe in that locker room poster quote, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right" (which is Shaughn's favorite quote to raz people, mainly me and our nieces.) I had a long stretch of thinking I could really own a labor and delivery--like really knock the socks off it. I'm not sure when that started to shift, but at some point I noticed that I also was a little afraid that maybe I couldn't rock it. That it was going to be too hard. And that maybe it just wasn't going to happen for me. Something would go terribly wrong and when it was all said and done I wouldn't be going home with my baby. Doubting yourself is a terrible thing to shake. It's way worse than just straight up fear of pain, which I have but doesn't trouble me that much. Doubt is more like a sense of doom that no matter what you do you are marked for something awful. It's one of those scary loops that is hard not to think is foreshadowing. So yesterday I had a little chat with myself about tapping into the "You can rock this." I decided that the best way to regain some confidence is to stop doing things to pass the time and start doing things I love. In a fake it till I make it kind of way I'm on a mission to create a happy this-is-a-good-time-to-have-a-baby vibe. I'm not entirely sure how to do it, but I'm hoping it's baths, and books, and early aughts mixed cds. (Back when we made mixes on cds because it was so much easier than hovering over our tape decks with our fingers poised to push stop at exactly the right moment but before we all got access to most music or had the internet make mixes for us) And, of course, walks to the bakery where I had the most amazing twice baked chocolate almond croissant. I mean it was epic. It was definitely positivity in a baked good.