I Don’t Expect to Sleep Through the Night

Well, it wasn’t as clear cut as it sounds. Where did we leave off? I think I told you that I had to take Rider to my 35 week appointment and he has legit doctor phobia (I feel ya, kid) and even if he’s not the patient, he screams when he sees blood pressure cuffs and other such things. So of course he started whimpering when I was being weighed last week, and was full on screaming when that blood pressure cuff was around my arm. And you know that I know that you know that I have anxiety. So of course my blood pressure got borderline high, although not yet high enough for the hospital. Just high for me. We tried again 10-15 minutes later and he cried again. Finally, the midwife tried it AFTER the appointment and it had gone down to my near normal.

Of course I thought about it all during the week, listening to “blood pressure lowering” music, doing deep breathing, and making attempts at relaxation, like playing hooky, asking for house help, taking long and luxurious baths, and the like. I was confident going into my ultrasound that things would be ok. The ultrasound was great! Although the baby is already estimated to be seven pounds at 36 weeks, which is ridiculous if it’s true. That said, I think I was pretty big at my birth, Des was gigantic, and Rider was big. So maybe that’s just how it is. We shall see. My blood sugars have been fine so it’s not that. Whatever it is, it’s genetics or that whatever will be, will be.

I had an exam after the ultrasound, and luckily some time to sit on a bench outside the hospital, with my face turned towards the sun. I was able to relax enough to register a decent blood pressure reading and exam, but since it had spiked the previous week, I had to go back to the hospital for every lab under the sun. Or so it seemed! Then, I finally went home and got Rider in my arms and waited for the endless test results to pile into my inbox, and each one was fine. Better than fine. I am not having issues. I love that I have proactive midwives who test for them, but sometimes, often, a blood pressure reading is high for no physical reason. In labor, my blood pressure was high when they started me on Pitocin and gave me a COVID test. It went down, of course, and when the nurse commented on it, I asked, “Are there really people who don’t have high blood pressure when they’re being induced in a pandemic?” There ARE people like that.

Sometimes, I like to turn questions around, because they become the only thing I want to know. Many years ago, I had an interview at the second busiest Trader Joe’s in the world (surpassed then by one in NYC), and at the end, he asked if I had any questions. I asked him if he had any concerns for hiring me. He seemed a little surprised by that question, and maybe honestly said that I had no retail experience but also that he had a good feeling about hiring me. I didn’t last at that job very long, because my Innkeeper dream job opened up and I couldn’t do both, but I don’t think his instincts were wrong. Everything is timing and chemistry and health and choices and instincts. The other day, my midwife asked me, as we were ending the exam, if I had any concerns about the pregnancy or myself. I said that I didn’t, within reason, and then asked her the same. “Do YOU have any concerns about my pregnancy?” And she smiled and said no.

Maybe everything is timing and chemistry and health and choices and instincts, and love and luck and circumstance and chance, and maybe I’m playing the weirdest waiting game of my life. I expect it to be different, but also to feel like bits and pieces of what I have felt before. Friends say that I should be calmer because it’s my fourth time, but in fact, I think it’s the opposite. The bits and pieces of aches and pains and NICU stays; large babies and oxygen saturation levels and epidurals with fevers and non epidurals with thoughts of dying. Rising blood pressure and raising pulse. There’s only so much you can know, and you don’t know. I don’t even know if this is a girl or a boy, and will there be curls or knobby knees. Will it be like Rider was, not long ago, or is it already set so vastly apart, it will be like a bomb landing here?

Of course it will. There are bombs and there are love bombs, and every day is a waiting game of struggling to keep on top of the toddler and the work and my health. And there will be more of the same of that, but with some new reliefs and some new burdens. I cannot wrap my head around that, but I never will be able to wrap my head around that. My days are so Rider-filled, and they still will be, but there will be a whole new shape carved out of love. Someone so small and vulnerable, as opposed to Rider’s sturdiness, and I wonder so much who I will be. You never want to change, and think you won’t change, but the fact is that within a few weeks, at the most, my entire life will look nothing like it does right now. And it’s ok not to cling to everything I am right now, because everything I am will grow as well. I won’t hold on too tightly. Instead, I’ll let go because I’ll have no other choice, into the depths and murky mysteries of this love bomb.