Waiting
The freezer is absolutely chock-a-block with my homemade meals. The cot has been built. The newborn clothes all laundered.
Yes, we’re here, at ‘the business end’, waiting for what I call ‘splashdown’, but suddenly time is crawling.
It seems there is still the opportunity to complete all the (many) useful tasks that will make life easier once the baby is here, and yet I’ve reached a bit of an impasse.
Putting the finishing touches to the hospital bag, for starters.
The most important person — Vic — has done her bit, but I’ve noticed I’m struggling to find the wherewithal to put a change of clothes, a book, some toiletries and a spare toothbrush into the holdall for me.
I was like this when I gave birth a few years ago, and I think my procrastinating is due to something I have christened ‘baggy time’. I don’t like staring at the final frontier of time — I’d rather have some hurdles in place — and that’s because invariably, when I do have ‘baggy time’, I tend to fill it with OCD checks. In this case, it’d be fussing over the bag and triple checking I have everything I need.
So the hospital bag remains partly unfilled, and I suspect it will do so until Vic has the first twinge that something is happening. Then I’ll be running around like a headless chicken and probably thinking ‘why the effing eff didn’t I do this a few weeks ago?!’
And the answer will be because I preferred that to the alternative — adding yet more pointless checks to my life in the meantime.
Pushing through
Waiting for something life-changing consumes a lot of energy, and I wonder if that’s why I’ve struggled with fatigue this week, despite not doing anything out of the ordinary.
Or could it be that I’m experiencing a fatigue lag? The past six weeks, especially, have been busy. Extended trips away to see family, friends staying over, long dog walks, plus we’ve crammed in Covid, projectile vomiting and a stinky ear infection — and I’ve whipped through that week of intense batch cooking, don’t forget — and through all that, I didn’t feel as tired as I felt I should have done.
In fact, there were moments where I wondered if I’d cracked it, ‘it’ being fatigue management.
Is the trick just to push through? To not stop?
But I’ve just endured a week where my legs have felt heavy climbing the stairs, and I’ve craved cat-naps to recharge my batteries come mid-afternoon.
Given MS has such a patchy impact on me — sometimes it’s very much a problem, and sometimes it very much isn’t — I occasionally wonder how much it affects my ability to live a ‘normal’ life, and this was something I was thinking about earlier this week, after attending a midwife appointment with Vic.
I find everything about pregnancy fascinating: the physiological aspect; the psychological too; and that despite all the chat about birth plans, the giving birth ‘bit’ is so inherently unknowable until it actually happens.
Anyway, I was watching the midwife do her thing, and I was thinking how amazing it would be to do her job. I’ve definitely reached the stage in my life where I know the most rewarding way a person can spend their time is to help other people, and a midwife is the epitome of that.
Maybe I could train as one…
A fit of excitement prompted me to download the official literature and look at what they desire in a trainee midwife. Although I felt I could tick most of them off, there were a few things I paused over, namely my willingness to do three years’ study for it, and my ability to take blood. (After literally hundreds of injections I’ve pretty much gotten over my own needle phobia, but my coping strategy does require looking away, which I imagine wouldn’t go down too well if I was the one wielding the syringe…)
Then I saw the line: ‘you’ll need to declare any special needs related to a disability’. Hmm. I lingered over that one. I tend to declare on official documents (i.e. when I booked my driving test) that I DON’T have a disability. This isn’t anything to do with stigma, it’s just a nagging sense that I’d feel like a fraud if said I was disabled.
A few short hours later though, and I felt sure the midwife thing was to remain but a fleeting dream. A crushing fatigue that pinned me to the sofa at 3pm had caused fantasy to collide with reality.
Could I really pursue a career, on the cusp of being 38, whereby the trick — to just ‘not stop’ — would have to be implemented five days a week, sometimes overnight, and with such a profound burden of responsibility, that I couldn’t stop, even if my brain had momentarily ground to a halt?
Probably not.
So yes, in some respects I am disabled by my MS, even if only because it limits my ability to daydream about possibilities (and hardly outrageous ones at that) which other healthy people my age can muse.
So there is a distinct sense it’s closed down some avenues of life.
And that is an enduring source of sadness.
Doula-ing
Alongside batch cooking, another productive thing we’ve done during all this waiting for the baby is to have a virtual catch-up with our beloved former doula, who was my birth partner alongside Vic a few years ago.
Michelle takes great delight in reminding us about how I fell asleep while giving birth (and that was after they’d seen the baby’s head, so it was relatively well into proceedings).
But this time ‘it’s not about me’ — to quote the mantra of Vic’s pregnancy, after I’ve hogged so much of the recent medical limelight — so I ask our former doula one key question: ‘now I’m the birth partner, what can I do to best help Vic?’
Her response is immediate. ‘Each mum has to look in the mirror and find their own strength. This is Vic’s journey. Don’t rescue her.’
How true her words are, and how glad I am she said them. It was something that deep down I knew already, but I needed the prompt — that sometimes the main way to support someone giving birth is to do nothing at all. I’ve watched enough episodes of One Born Every Minute to see how some birth partners feel compelled to fill any silence with questions that need an answer — ‘Are you okay? How are you feeling? Are you coping?’ — questions which might soothe the partner’s anxiety, but places an unnecessary demand on the birthing mum’s attention and energy.
At Michelle’s suggestion, I wore an eye mask throughout my labour so I could remove all distractions.
My job then was just to listen to my body — and my job now is to watch.
Watch and wait.
Great post, very interesting!