36 weeks

Tomorrow I will hit 36 weeks of carrying these babies. It is also father's day and the day Caden was born. I hate to admit this, but I'm ready to not be pregnant anymore. I have felt guilty for this, this desire to complain, this non-enjoyment of pregnancy. I wanted so badly to be pregnant again, and I know I will never be pregnant again, and I know I will be wistful at some point about these kicks and stretches and rolls inside me, about the sheer enormity of my body and the miracle of being a home to two babies, and I am trying to find the place where I can savor and enjoy all that, but the truth is, I am tired. I have to spend a lot of time lying down. It hurts too much to curl into my husband on the couch or make dinosaurs move across the floor with my son, or plant the starts withering away in my garden beds, and if I can't enjoy this part, then I'd like to move onto the next. Babies. Two tiny babies. Who will need constant tending and I will not sleep for the next years, so maybe I should try again to enjoy this last part.

Should. Does it ever serve us? What happens if I go back to the yes. Yes, I am carrying almost twelve pounds of baby. Yes, my bones and muscles and skin aches from this strain. Yes, my mobility is limited. Yes, I am short of breath just sitting here. Yes my blood pressure and my blood sugars are high and this is making me feel very weird and woozy a lot of the time. Yes, this is hard. Something in me does relax when I say yes, instead of fighting the experience. Yes, it has been a long pregnancy. Yes, my body has done incredible things, and is working very hard. Yes, yes, yes.

I am aware that I stand on a threshold. These babies will come soon, whether it's tomorrow or two weeks from now, it won't be long now. I am still working to embrace both the knowns and unknowns about how they will enter the world. There are times when I can approach it all with an honest curiosity, and other times when I find myself gripping to my ideas of what constitutes a "good birth." In the end the health of these babies and giving myself the best chance to be strong enough to care for them is my top priority, but I find myself tripping over my own judgments around pain medication, my own fears around lines and tubes, and surgeries. I want to let myself have a "good birth" no matter how they enter the world. I am also trying to find the balance between giving myself the best chance to labor naturally and deliver vaginally, and to follow the medical advice that is based on keeping babies safe in a worst case scenario. It's a fine line. What I know from assisting laboring women is that holding tight, clenching our fists, does not facilitate letting our bodies open, and I know I cannot grip too tightly my ideas of how I want to labor, and how I want these babies to born.

The sun rises early now. Surrounding my time in bed, there has been an awful lot of magic this spring. A robin nested in our eaves and two babies hatched, screamed for worms, grew big, and then emerged from the underbrush one day foraging for worms themselves. The two strawberry plants I carelessly threw in a latent part of the garden two autums ago have spread into a robust strawberry patch where Caden forages. Peas grew and blossomed and hang ready to eat, raspberries ripened. A flock of sparrows visits us daily eating the seeds from the grasses I never weeded out of the lawn strip this year. They perch on the fence and in the lilacs and fly up into our eaves- maybe there are nests up there I can't see. From my bed I have watched bleeding hearts emerge, Rhododendron bloom and fall, ferns unfurl new growth. Sometimes it is not such a bad thing to have your world shrink down to that which immediately surrounds you. I'd like to view this last part of pregnancy as the beginning of the journey to meet my babies. I don't know if I my blood pressure will hold steady enough for my body to tolerate labor. If I do labor, I don't know if I will be handle all the monitors strapped to me without pain medication. I don't know what the journey will be like, but it can begin now with trying to stay present in my body, in this reality.