Week fifteen

I’ll be honest — I’ve had a couple of days now of nagging worry. Tuesday I slipped on a pair of pants that I was unable to button just last week and the dang things fit. I thought maybe it was a fluke so I tried on another pair and sure enough, it fit too. I mean, they fit OK but not awfully comfortably. The same thing happened Wednesday, I don’t know. I find it unsettling. And I know that weight fluctuation is normal, and that my belly was mostly water and gas throughout the first trimester, and that that has a tendency to settle or even out or change as the weeks pass. But I still do not like the feeling of steady growth suddenly shrinking.

I am trying not to worry but the brain goes to dark places when in doubt. As soon as I find “yes, this is normal” reassurances on mommy message boards, I click on something that turns out to be tragic. What good is worrying? I ask myself. You can’t do anything about it. What’s happening is what’s happening. Let it happen and just have faith that things will work out as they need to work out. But, well, faith alone doesn’t grow healthy babies.

Of course on the most basic level I have faith and hope that things are fine. I feel fine. Things surely are fine.

And yet, when the night grows quiet and it’s just me awake, lying there with my hands on my stomach, trying to divine some sense of the life that’s inside me, I whisper my pleas: “Please, baby. Don’t leave.” And the morbid part of me strains in the acute hope that I am not already talking to a ghost.

I mean, how do you really know, during these long pauses between midwife or doctor visits?

I don’t necessarily want to rush through what has been an admittedly laid-back pregnancy so far, but I do long to be at a point where I can feel the baby moving. Just so I can know what’s going on. That something IS going on. I suppose, if you take this to its logical end, it means I am going to be a bit of a meddler in my child’s life. I’ve had plenty of practice as a hovering art director; I see no reason to relinquish my nosiness now when it will surely be of more use to the world.

In less morbid news, my former tadpole should now be the size of a navel orange. Which is what I just ate, so ew, she says, pushing the peels out of her line of sight. In a wonderfully science fictiony twist, the baby’s skin is nearly translucent. It’s possible — well, probable, given my DNA, that the baby is starting to suck its teeny little thumb. (Which reminds me of an adorable story about my dad, who — like me — was a dedicated thumb sucker as a child. He was riding his horse as a boy of 10 or so out in the pasture, and got bucked off. The horse then stepped on his thumb — his preferred sucking thumb! — and my dad interpreted that as a sign from God to stop with the thumb sucking already. Also I think the nail fell off and who would want to suck that? Don’t answer that, Internet.)

After reading several birth books (with another in my mental queue), I decided to graduate to a Ina May’s breastfeeding book. In what will surely be used as evidence of my lack of parental fitness some day, I am enjoying flashing Ray with the included pictures of undoctored boobs in funny positions. Today’s flash was an inverted nipple being squeezed to all hell so it would pop out. Ray was confused but probably aroused.

What else?

Oh, I had some pretty dull but annoying lower-back pain for several days. My friend Stephanie lent me a foot stool at work to help with my bad sitting posture. Plus I did some deep stretching, and the pain seems to have gone away.

I see Amy, my midwife, on Tuesday for our first official checkup. My every minute between now and then will be spent simply trying to pass the time until I can hear that heartbeat again.