From the Pages of Giant-Di: Waiting for Baby

Here’s what I was writing on Sunday, May 24th, just over a year ago.

It’s late.  We’ve just come home from my parents’ house where we had a nice evening, beautiful weather, good supper.  It was so weird to think that most likely, the next time I visit there, it will be as a mom, along with my child.  Now that my due date is this week, it seems even more bizarre and unreal that I will be a parent that soon. [Wrongo.] That when planning activities over the next few days, I have to take into account, will I be a mom?

I’m pretty nervous.  Not really about the labour part, though of course once the pain hits I’m sure I’ll have some accompanying anxiety.  Nope, mostly about the actual having of a child of my own.  A tiny, floppy one who cries.

It sounds like that’s all I think my son will be… that’s not how I mean it.  But that is the essence of what makes me nervous.  I haven’t spent a lot of time with newborns, and what I know is that they seem so fragile you feel sure you’ll break them.  And that lately, when I hear a new baby crying, it gives me a stab of panic where I think, Can I really handle this? I know I can, and I will, but that doesn’t stop the irrational worry that somehow, in spite of all my learning and general competence, and in spite of all the support I have around me, in spite of Sean’s and my motivation, I will fail at this.

I do feel better when I think about my friend K, and how we will be in basically the same boat except that she has experience I can draw upon.  I like thinking about how calm baby T was for the hours I was there, and thinking about my own baby and how he’ll be just as tiny but with his own face, made from Sean’s and mine.

Man, this baby is really stepping on my bladder a lot tonight.  I wonder if that means he’s finally dropping.  My belly does feel very heavy to me today (not that it’s been light and fluffy recently), but I don’t know if that means anything.

Today I finally picked up a chest of drawers for the baby’s room, and used the gift card to get some other items it will be good to have on hand right away.  E’s room is still not exactly ready – sorry, little guy – but then, neither is he I guess.  My sister has been going around taking video footage of the house and us in daily activities, narrating to E about what things are like before his arrival.  It’s a pretty cool idea – I’d love to see such a video of my parents before they had kids, to get an idea of the reality of life at the time.

Funny how it was, to be waiting around for a tiny person I knew we would love intensely, who I knew would bring incredible joy to our lives… but we didn’t know what that really meant until he arrived. You can try to imagine, but it doesn’t do justice to the way it really feels. How his beauty would be almost unbearable, how tenderness would stop us in our tracks, and how our whole universe would shift to put him at the top of our minds and the centre of our hearts.

Oh, I’m such a lucky mama.