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.