Life, One Week at a Time
All summer I’ve been counting my life in weeks.
Sometime in the last week of April I realized I was probably pregnant. It was too early to test and I was spooked about it anyway, so I waited. Two weeks later, the day after Mother’s Day, I confirmed what had been pretty unmistakable because I was already having symptoms. At that point the magic number was a measly five. Nothing to get too excited about. Five weeks later we saw the little guy/gal and it looked good. Ten was a good number. At week twelve we saw a bigger, more human-looking little bugger who still looked good and healthy.
Fourteen was an even better number because I finally left behind the endless (well, it was about seven or eight, all told) weeks of feeling like I could barf at any second, and all I could do when I wasn’t at work was lay on the couch. When I was at work it was all I could do not to go catatonic at my desk. There was very little I wanted to eat besides cereal and King’s Hawaiian Rolls, and I couldn’t drink plain water. I got really tired of those weeks.
Now I pretty much have the opposite problem—I want cake and cheeseburgers and grapefruit juice despite the indigestion and ice cream and peanut butter cookies and sure I have my taste for salad and vegetables back but they’re not nearly as exciting as brown sugar cinnamon pop-tarts. Granted they’re the health food brand of pop-tarts from Whole Foods, but who am I kidding? So basically what I’m saying is I’m helping along the development of the baby belly a little.
Anyway, now I’m well into 16 weeks pregnant. Week 17 of pregnancy. I even feel it swishing and poking around in there sometimes. My ribs hurt because there’s nowhere else on my midget frame for my organs to go except to encroach on my ribcage, though I don’t have much of an actual baby belly to show for it. It’s a bit of an awkward stage. So now the number that looms is 20. We’ve really never been more convinced that we’ll have a baby moving in with us, but given that this is the third time I’ve been pregnant in the last 11 months we’re not counting our baby-shaped chicken before it hatches. So that 20-22 week anatomy scan will be pretty important to our peace of mind.
Then maybe I can start counting down the weeks instead of counting up; planning for a big arrival in January rather than qualifying it with an “if.” We’ll have a lot to count down to—a bedroom to clean out, paint & furnish, a house to properly nest in, and dear God we have to pick a name out of all the millions of names there are. And I’ll be 37 weeks pregnant when Christmas rolls around, so it seems like early preparations for that would be a good idea.
So, oddly but unavoidably, a big part of my existence lately has been defined by the number of weeks I’ve been gestating, and (hopefully!) that’s not about to change anytime soon.
