Pre-prelabor day fourteen

The other night I was laying in bed, firmly cocooned in my pillow fort (that's three on the headboard, one under my hip, one behind my back, one between my legs, and a giant body pillow between Paul and I). Waves of pain were emanating from what I'm guessing is my cervix. In between chanting my new relaxation mantra--ow, ow, ouch, ow--I said to Paul, I've gone through my whole life without ever really feeling pain. This made him laugh, which validated my sense of comic timing (you have to cling to your meager, intermittent successes when you look like a giant pear and feel like there's a metal rod shoved through your back).

It's also true. When I was five I broke my arm. That must have hurt but I remember the cool cast more than the pain. I had cramps when I was a teenager, but good-old BCP took care of that for many years. So I'm studying all these unusual pains--the aches, the stabs, the discomforts. This is what I wanted: to go through labor without medication so I could feel the full experience. What a dork. And we haven't even started yet.

I often think about that scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which O'Toole holds his hand over the match to show off his super-human pain tolerance (which must have seemed shocking in the pre-Fear Factor, pre-Eastern-philosophy-saturated 1960s American culture), then invites another guy to try it.

William Potter: Ooh! It damn well 'urts!
T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What's the trick then?
T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

I've been trying to find this in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom but it appears this sum-up is the invention of a screenwriter who wanted to encapsulate Lawrence's various thoughts on pain into one pithy line.

Paul has been excellent at keeping my spirits up. Last Friday, we took a trip to Costco, usually a source of distress, which surprisingly yielded two happy pills: 1) I got to drive a handi-cart (sitting on your ass the whole time substantially improves the Costco experience, trust me); 2) We bought Guitar Hero II which allows me to realize my dreams of being a rock star momma, with the guitar controller resting comfortably on my poochy belly as I clunk through the color-coded notes. My band, Procreat, is now on tour and rockin' Providence. (The downside? You do get songs like "Cherry Pie" and "Carry on Our Wayward Son" stuck in your head for days.)

No news on the baby front. I've had various signs of labor, all of which mean that he could be born today or in two days or in two weeks. So I'm also studying patience and finding that, while I ask a lot of questions (the triage nurse knows me by first name now), I am a willing and curious student. Is there any other time in my life that I will get to sit on the couch for hours starting at my books, staring at the baby toys, staring at my toes? When I say hours, I'm not exaggerating. The trick is not minding that you're wasting time.

Pre-prelabor day four

The small soldier came up to Gros-Louis waving a newspaper.

"It's peace!"

Gros-Louis set down his bucket. "What did you say, my boy?"

"I said it's peace."

Gros-Louis looked at him dubiously.

"Peace? But there hasn't been war."

After three days of painful, then nonpainful, then intermittent contractions (which, oddly, I keep calling "transactions"), I have no contractions, productive or otherwise.

I feel like the characters from The Reprieve, Sartre's novel about Parisians frantically gearing up for war in 1938 only to wake up one morning and find out that Daladier had signed the Munich agreement (the "peace" in which he agreed to cede part of France to the Sudeten Germans).

Of course, instead of enlisting, confessing secrets, or drinking ourselves blind we were timing contractions, writing a birth plan, and setting up the co-sleeper. But, we're ready now, by god.

A country road. A tree. Evening.

Mr. Godot told me to tell you that he won't come this evening but surely to-morrow.

Today I stopped taking the nifedipine (that blood pressure medicine that's been keeping my smooth muscles quiet ... i.e., stopping those daily contractions I've been having from really going anywhere.)

I'm not sure if I'm Didi and Paul's Gogo, or the other way around. I'm here and he's out, so I'm my own sidekick tonight. No contractions now. Just waiting.

Oh, Inverted Belly

Some mornings I wake up and say, he grew last night. Mostly it's a guess, I feel slightly stretched on one side or the other. This morning, though, I stumbled into the shower and ran the soap over my belly and my belly button, which has been slowly disappearing over the past few weeks, is gone. Or, I should say, inverted. I didn't realize how much I liked my belly button, or playing with my belly button, until it was gone. This is all temporary, of course. In the shower, I started reciting that bit from Bill Cosby's "Kindergarten" about the navel game:

"I was playing with my navel ([deep voice] oh, navel, navel). My mother said, 'Alright, keep playing with your navel, pretty soon you're gonna break it wide open the air's gonna come right out of your body and you'll fly around the room backwards for 30 seconds, land and you'll be flat as a piece of paper with just your little eyes buggin out.' I used to carry band-aids around with me in case I had an accident."

I've hit my limit of technical expertise (or Blogger's, depending on how you look at it) and can't offer you a quick link to it. But you can get a download here for only 32 cents.

If I find a site where I can upload the mp3, I'll post it. Or you can come to our house and we'll play it for you. Idiot mittens. Luke warm, curdly milk. Good stuff.