The End of The Last Pregnancy . . . I Think*

*I Think refers to both parts . . . this being the last pregnancy, and this actually being the end of this one.

Thirty-nine weeks pregnant and I’m in the car with my family running errands.

Me: I don’t think she’s ever going to come out.

Nathan {laughing}: She’ll be 18 and still in there and asking for a new cell phone.

Me: {Silently stares daggers into his head.}

Nathan {still laughing}: I wonder what’s the longest someone’s been pregnant for.

And then I jumped across the front seat and strangled him.

But not really, because we had innocent bystanders in the car (well . . . I don’t know how innocent the two and six year old are, but at that moment they were being far less annoying than their father).

I was my mom’s last baby. Last of four . . . just like this baby. (My mom had a miscarriage before she got pregnant with me, so she also was pregnant four times, but raised three kids, like me). She always told me that the reason I was born two weeks late was because she loved being pregnant so much, and she knew that I was her last, so she wanted to hold on to the experience for as long ash she could.

The cynical 39 weeks and two days pregnant woman in me, seriously wants to have a conversation with her about this.

But part of me gets it.

This our last baby (I think) and there is something truly wonderful about being pregnant. Besides not having to worry about my muffin top . . . I absolutely love the feeling of her moving inside of me. Rubbing her back through my stomach. Feeling her hiccup and practice breathing. It feels unimaginable that in a few days (weeks, months, years . . . because that is how it feels right now), I will have to share her. I will have to let other people hold her and rock her.

I never had any of my other kids sleep in our room with us, and honestly that’s really what works best for our family and our babies, but there is something so sad about the idea of her all the way down the hall with two doors between us.

I both love and hate with a fiery passion this picture, which I guess makes it sort of perfect for this post.

I also feel so nervous about how this will affect my other kids. Don’t get me wrong (and I know that I’ve written about this before), I know that in the long run they will be totally fine . . . but I love my relationships with them right now. And it worries me that something could change that. You know?

On the other hand, the mental anguish for me being pregnant is tangible. It seems like very few people really understand just how horribly hard it is for me to be pregnant. I know that it’s a stress on any family and on any couple. Take that and multiply it times 8 billion for us. When the doctor takes more than 5 seconds to find her heartbeat, I am certain she has died inside me, despite feeling her kicks minutes before. When my belly doesn’t measure the way I think it should, I go into a mental tail spin, since that was our only sign that something was wrong with Elliot.

After losing my mom shortly after Gavin was born and losing Elliot shortly after he was born, it really is hard for me to imagine pregnancies for me ending in sunshine and rainbows.

Nathan looked into my worried eyes the other day, and told me that he is so glad that this is our last baby. While he and I would both love to have more children, the idea of going through this again, literally feels unimaginable.

Ambivalence.

When I was in college, studying social work, I learned about ambivalence. Before studying about it, I always thought it meant feeling “Eh” about something. But that’s not what it means. It actually means, feeling very strongly in two different directions. {That’s totally the Webster definition, look it up.}

And so that’s the end of this pregnancy for me. I’m so ready to be done and have my body back, but I don’t want to be separated from my baby. I need the anxiety of this pregnancy to be over so I can just hold her and see her breathing, but what about my other kids? My feet (legs, arms, back, everything) are killing me, GET HER OUT! But . . . I really love sleeping through the night. I want a margarita!! But the pushing her out part is going to really suck . . .

See?

Ambivalence.

It’s probably a good thing I don’t have a say in all this, huh?