The Baby Knows Best

 One phrase I have read a few too many times lately is the baby will let me know when he's ready to come out. Another variant I see is "your body knows." Well if my body knows I would like it to share with my brain when this baby is making his grand debut. I have never been patient and I lack traditional sentimentality. As I do not consider myself an earth mama who walks barefoot caressing her stomach but rather a globe trying to stay on it's axis I find the whole body/baby knows thing to be quite a load of crap. 

If bodies were so clever there wouldn't be diseases that much is obvious. If a body/baby knew best there wouldn't be breached pregnancies. If bodies knew best there wouldn't be a need for the hospitals and staff to help you through this. So that notion I flatly reject, I know people joke "oh he's too comfortable in there" so I Googled the longest human gestation. 17 months! Insanity! #BodyFail. I do love my son and I am excited to meet him, but I have always been an anxious person with a lot of mind hurdles. It has been difficult for me to see the finish line when I'm standing behind a bunch of hurdles. 

The first hurdles I have installed myself with the nesting instinct. I have become convinced I need to shampoo the carpets before the baby, nevermind that at some point poop and pee will probably land on them. I already power washed the house, but now I'm waiting on more packages. Clearly I needed a dinosaur robe to wear to breast feed since at this point my ass rejects all clothing, even the size Mediums I bought for it as an offering. It said "nom nom nom bitch, up the crack I go" and I'm not ready to commit to an entire new wardrobe. My size is another difficulty. In the least ha-ha way I remember lathering butter on pieces of bread and chewing it up then prompty spitting it out in the trashcan in high school to not gain weight. In college I had "Fasting Friday's" where I would you guessed it not eat or just eat a salad. I would require myself to see I had burned 700 cardio calories before I could leave the gym to allow myself a proper dinner and after dinner drinks. Lots and lots of drinks. I would mix vodka shots with crystal light full pitcher packets to cover the disgusting low cal cocktails. I had body dismorphia and therapy helped immensely! But seeing 150 pounds on a scale when you are use to 118 is fucking hard. Not having access to the gym you loved because of a pandemic is hard. Not fitting into baggy shorts you've had for 8 years is hard. I get that I am growing a baby but mentally it's hard to not creep back into old body dismorphic thought when the medium underwear is too tight. 

Another hurdle is food. I do love food actually and snacking and I spent the vast majority of my life having food catered to me, not me to someone else. My mom cooked dinner every night growing up and packed my lunches, I went to college and got meal plans or boyfriends who would make chicken tenders which was fine by me, I then dated a guy whose mom owned a restaurant (cha-ching free food all the time), I lived with my sister who would always have extra food, and my job gave me $80 a day for food for YEARS. So when Ky asks what do I want for dinner I genuinely don't know. It's been a year and I don't know how people make that decision. I just don't get it. What do I want for dinner? I want to have $80 free dollars and be walking in Chicago and think Vapiano's would be good for tonight. Or I want to pop on down to Life Kitchen and get a CBD infused charcoal lemonade with a 500 calories flatbread and a gluten free cookie for an amount of money that doesn't exist to me because I'm using my corporate card. Then perhaps tomorrow I'll try that ramen place or take it easy and just buy a bunch of overpriced whatever at Whole Foods. Asking me to cook is like asking a pig to plan a wedding. You can do it, but the pig doesn't know what you're saying or where to begin. You want me to plan a meal? But why? So when I grocery shop I buy staples, but a bunch of staples with no paper is just painful. Translation? No one just wants to eat plain chicken or plain noodles. I know what people hypothetically eat but I don't know how to put it together. AND NOW I'M GOING TO HAVE A BABY?!? 

I would be fine to breastfeed the baby for two years if it meant avoiding food prep, the only negative is breast feeding means you have to care about what goes into your body. Mainly avoiding things like CBD infused charcoal lemonade and Botox. So that plan is out and I am staring at another hurdle. You have successfully avoiding meal planning for 32 years. You have two weeks until he is due so why don't you go ahead and have a personality shift and learn to enjoy the arduous back breaking task of standing over a hot pan and stirring for 30 minutes before having to clean up for another 30 minutes to enjoy some rice and veg. Sounds like a terrible plan. 

Meanwhile once I get through all my hypothetical hurdles I am still left wondering if I am a terrible person for not glowing and not feeling like an average mom. My mom has never been overly sentimental, but I see my peers and women my age just become lobotomized by their child. These women are sucking snot from their babies noses and being excited by it. They where Thing 1 and Thing 2 shirts to take a picture when no one looks good in fire engine red. They post crap on social media about their mediocre husband for being so supportive that he too loves the kid they just made. I see pictures of babies posted from old friends and think "meh" or "oof she does not look great" and somehow ignore their happiness. Sure they aren't important people to me, but fuck I'm quite the ghoul and I feel weird about it. 

I don't enjoy reading things like "you'll be lucky to get a three minute shower." Fucking why? Why would that be difficult to get? The baby should sleep around 18 hours a day. I understand I will be tired but do I have to give up grooming too? Shouldn't I be able to get in a walk and shower in that time frame? Then I bought tickets to an art gallery for around 8 weeks after the baby should be born and by what I've read online I shouldn't be mentally ready to leave him until after a year and what kind of heartless cunt will take 75 minutes out of their day to see a cool exhibit when they made a baby? I don't want to be a totally different person but I also see I am totally different than so many women. It's why I have at times understood "I'm a man in a woman's body." I don't actually feel that way but my personality is not exactly the same as other women's especially on this stuff. 

And finally I am sitting here knowing I will be in immense pain soon. I know childbirth is painful, everyone says so, there are a few exceptions, but for the 99.99% it is about as painful as something "normal" can get. It's hard to sit here and not be nervous that maybe today, maybe tomorrow I could rip my skin from vagina to asshole. I could break a rib. I could crack a hip. I could have spinal fluid leak into some wrong spot and be super sick. I could have my abdominal muscles ripped apart. None of that is uncommon! The ripping is considered normal. I could shit on a table in front of a room of people and again it would be normal. And if I do manage to avoid all of that I am still in for a world of pain as my body ejects a watermelon through a golf ball. That watermelon will then latch onto my nipples and gnaw on them and I should be swooning at the idea and I'm just terrified. I am fat and scared. I am scared I won't click into what everyone else expects me to be. I am scared that my body will "know best" and just fuck me over. I'm scared I won't get to go on vacations anymore. And I'm scared of hurting this kid that I already love. I'm scared when he hasn't moved enough for the day. I clearly want him to be happy and healthy, but it's just a lot mentally to deal with. So instead I focus on the hurdles. The carpets that need to be cleaned, the comforter that is in the washing machine, the package that should be delivered today and the shit I can sort of (but not really) control. This whole ordeal has been uncontrollable. And that is scary and hard, but part of life. I never had any real control over situations, just how I react to them. I hope to embrace my bizarre blunt aggresive with love personality and that my kid will like it as much as my husband.