Lady Adventure

The Pregnancy Train

(This is another pregnancy post. Feel free to click away if you came for the crafts.)


I'm now in my 39th week, i.e. 38 weeks plus small change. That means - as all my healthcare providers take gleeful delight in telling me - that something can happen at any time, tee hee! Sadly, nothing seems to be happening at the moment and probably won't any time soon. This medical diagnosis is based on the fact that Mr Gingerbread needs two hours and two alarm clocks to get out of bed in the morning, so I can hardly hope that his offspring is going to exit my innards punctually or, indeed, early.

"Are you nervous about the birth?" my little sister asked.
Let me tell you about my attitude to pregnancy and birth, young 'un:

Imagine you're taking a train journey to somewhere really nice. You're looking forward to being at your destination, everyone has said it's quite lovely. And the train ride is very interesting - some parts of it are very beautiful, and although other parts of it might cause motion sickness, all in all it's really quite an experience. So you hop on the train and off you go.

The only problem is, you know this train is going to derail. At some point, there's going to be a great, big crash and the train is going go careening out of control. There's be blood and gore and confusion and chaos.  In the grand scheme of things, it won't last long. It'll seem like forever when you're in the middle of it, but afterwards you'll realise that it was just one day. And you know that, in all likelihood, everything's going to turn out fine and you'll still get to your destination and, chances are, it'll be every bit as nice as you were hoping but ...

you're still going to be on the train when it goes flying off the rails. So no matter how nice the journey is and how pretty the landscape looks, you have a sense of foreboding that sometime, sometime soon, that thing is going to happen. If you're not me, you can get into a place of zen and say, "It'll be an empowering experience! I'll feel enabled in my role as a woman!", or you can take my standpoint and view it with the same resigned dread as a root-canal treatment (of which I've had four and have survived to tell the tale.) I don't care if it empowers the living daylights out of me, I would look forward to it a lot more if it were called "slight inconvenience" or "mild discomfort" instead of "labour".

In the meantime, I'm going to distract myself by looking out the window and watching the nice scenery.
Not long now.