Labor?!?!

I’m one of those people who cannot read that pamphlet that Walgreens provides with your prescription. The mere suggestion of a potential side effect and I can almost guarantee that I will become symptomatic. So now that I am just about 36 weeks pregnant, I’m having the nervous feeling that I am going to go into labor at any moment.

After I had Drew, I was in labor for thirty-two hours and felt completely relaxed that I had all the time in the world when I started to feel symptomatic. With Gabby, however, I delivered twenty minutes after making it to the hospital. My symptoms started with just not feeling right. I have just not felt right this whole pregnancy, so if I’m going to use that to gauge labor I may have to move into the hospital. Not to mention I now I understand how fast you can go from baby inside to baby outside.

So now that I’m face to face with my third and final delivery, I am conscious of my every symptom. And despite the fact that I should be a pro at this point, there are so many other components with this circumstance because I have these two others to worry about. Two others that will be effected by my absence, two others that will be disrupted by any potential changes to their routine, two others whose lives are about to drastically change.

The funny thing about pregnancy is that you have this sort of relationship with your body your whole life. You know how you feel when you feel sick, you know what you are capable of, you know what things you are good at doing, etc. Then you get pregnant and your body is completely foreign to you. You have this “alien” growing inside, your body has features you didn’t know existed and you have ailments you never had before.

With each pregnancy, there were a whole new set of challenges. This pregnancy, as I have mentioned too many times to count, has been the hardest. Everyone reminds me, nicely of course, that it’s partially because my body is stretched out (how romantic), knows how to be pregnant and jumps to, and I’m older (lovely). So the fact that the story of this baby’s entrance into the world is not going to be the same as my previous stories, is no surprise.

As much as I tell myself that it’s early, I know what contractions feel like now, and I just feel uncomfortably pregnant not uncomfortably in labor, I still feel like I’m walking on egg shells in my own skin. Every delivery has a story and part of the excitement is not knowing what that story will be. So I’m just going to have to kick my feet back, chill out and wait to tell mine.