Waiting

On Thursday night, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. with cramps? contractions? so intense it made me nauseous. After I got done panicking, I thought, OK, maybe this is it! I lay there and tried to breathe through the bad feelings while I thought hard about how I was not going to barf and tried to decide whether or not I should wake up Spousal Unit. After a few minutes of the deep breathing, I fell back asleep. I woke up the next day feeling awful and exhausted. So, I spent Friday on the couch. Waiting for Something to Happen. Anything, really. Nothing did.

By the end of the day, I was totally pissed at myself for wasting the day, completely freaked out about childbirth, and so unreasonably lonely that by the time Spousal Unit came home from work (later than he said he would), I was primed for a major meltdown. I sobbed and sobbed. Plus, I got all clingy — like a toddler with stranger danger. The sobbing has stopped, but the clinging has persisted the last few days. I don’t want Spousal Unit to leave me at any point right now and I keep wanting to be assured that he’ll be there “on the big day.” Very strange. I like to think of myself as a tough, independent person who got over the co-dependent relationship phase once she left her teens. And normally I’m not that much of a weeper. But today I was reading one of my oh so many pregnancy books and it said that many women in the 9th+ month get needy and weepy — hormones and all that. So, I do feel a little better about my desire to wrap myself around Spousal Unit’s leg and not ever let go. (I have a very funny vision of him dragging my big-ass pregnant self along as he works on equipment at the Big Sciency Thingey and his co-workers look on in horror.) Oh, and FYI – he’s been a prince the last couple of days, doing everything and anything he can to make me happy and secure. It is lovely and sweet and reaffirms what a great guy he is.

But, this waiting thing is hard. Mainly because of the part where you don’t know what is going to happen and when. I’m not very good at either being patient or at letting go of control of things, both of which are essential when you are very pregnant and have a little less than a week to go until your due date. Yes, I know, due dates mean absolutely squat in this business. 7 of 10 babies arrive after their due dates, so it’s not like there is a schedule or anything. But, it is precisely that that is driving me bonkers. I mean, couldn’t the Gadlet send me a little email or text message or at least a dream or a vision or something saying, “O.K. Stewgad, you’ve got 6 more days, so make the most of them!” I suspect I’ve got more like 14 days — but man, if only I had some certainty! I’m not very good at the waiting patiently for anything, really, let alone for my life to completely change.

To help me with this Waiting Conundrum, yesterday I decided to clean out the bathroom cabinets. Have you looked in your bathroom cabinets lately? You might want to. It was Very Educational. I was astonished. Here’s a partial list of stuff I found: a prescription bottle of drugs from 1996, a huge bottle of 200 echinacea pills that expired in 2004, 10 used razor cartridges that just got stuck back in the cabinet instead of thrown away, 5 bottles of lotion with less than .25 an oz in them, all of the cabinet hinges and handles and screws and accompanying hardware that we replaced with nicer ones when we moved in 4 years ago, five used toothbrushes that I kept for cleaning grout in a bathroom that has no tile or grout, and a leg-waxing kit that I used once (and by once I mean one strip of wax, one strip of fabric, one rip, one giant excruciating sensation, one hysterical scream, and one vow to never attempt anything like that ever again) three years ago. Apparently purging and cleaning out the hinterlands of one’s house is also a 9th+ month symptom of pregnancy. It’s like those hormones drive you to make sure that your child can enter the world without bearing the karmic burden of your old boxes of leg wax and jars of expired flower powder pills.

I haven’t tackled anything else today, but next on the list is the closet under the stairs. I’m pretty sure that it contains every coat I’ve owned since college, all of Spousal Unit’s sailing and sporting equipment, our rollerblades, plus all of our camping gear. (stored there because when we moved in I insisted that it couldn’t be kept in the basement because of the smell. Nothing is worse than a moldy smelling two-man tent!) But, there’s got to be more than that in there since when you open the door, it is like a cartoon closet — the wall of stuff is so complete it fills the door frame and threatens to spill out so you just shove what you’ve got back into it and close the door and hope it all stays put. Yep, I’ve got my work cut out for me there. That should help with the Waiting.

And speaking of waiting, you may wonder how our kitchen is faring. We’re actually really, really pleased. The framing, electric, and windows are all done. This weekend S.U. is doing the insulation and is miserably scraping all of the glue from the ceiling that held the ancient cardboard ceiling tiles to the ancient beadboard ceiling. Both of which are essential steps so that the carpenters can start drywalling on Tuesday. They anticipate that the drywalling and initial plumbing will be done by the end of the week, so that next week we can do the painting and cabinet installation ourselves. (And by we/ourselves I mean Spousal Unit and whoever he can find to help him who isn’t insanely pregnant.) Woo hoo! Paying someone to do most of the remodeling work sure is a hell of a lot faster than doing it all yourself! I’ll post pictures next week sometime when we have the drywall up.

So, that leaves me with the Waiting. It’s not like I don’t have anything to do. There’s the dissertation, the knitting, the cleaning, the laundry, the dissertation, reading, walking, weeding the garden, oh, and did I mention the dissertation? But, playing the waiting game so far hasn’t been very conducive to Important Thinking kinds of tasks. So, I guess I’ll muddle along until the day, trying to be patient, trying to Allow the Universe and the Gadlet to make their own schedules without me, despite the fact that it is MY BODY, dammit, and trying not to make predictions about what that schedule might look like.

[However, if YOU want to make predictions about that schedule, there is a small betting pool going on around this and the gender issue. Histgrad has called September 9 (got a gender guess Histgrad?), my Mom says a girl on the 11th, Phaeon says a boy on the 15th, and Spousal Unit says the 14th and doesn’t have a gender guess, but I don’t know if he gets to bet since he wins a new baby at the end of it all. Many, many dates and gender options are still available if you want in! You could win your very own Honorable Mention on Pretty Hard, Dammit — almost as good as real cash!]