There have been a lot of tears in my house this weekend. Tears of frustration, tears of exhaustion and tears from a Vindaloo. There's an end in sight - I'm being induced on Thursday - but a lot of my upset stems from a rather stupid belief that my body is somehow not working the way it should be to deliver this baby. I feel like a complete and utter failure.
The baby is fine. Monitoring shows that Baby Ash is "textbook" - lots of movement, lots of increased heart rate when there's movement, and I've even tracked a couple of real, live contractions. They just haven't amounted to anything solid - even to open up just one centimeter more. So, the baby just isn't ready to greet the world... yet.
We've tried everything. Well, everything except for castor oil because the side effects scare me. However, last night's Vindaloo produced what I can only describe as comparable results to castor oil; there's a reason that the dish has "loo" in the name. What a stupid, stupid choice which resulted in a sleepless night and increased irritability. Still - desperate times call for desperate measures.
Everything seems to be able to piss me off (sorry about the language, I figure I can get a free pass at 9 days overdue, right?). There seem to be a lot of people due around the same time as me, and I've been seeing baby albums on Facebook and bursting into tears. At the hospital the other day, we saw two couples from our prenatal classes who were due one and two weeks after us respectively; one couple already had their baby, and the other were pacing up and down in the transition phase of labor. Tears again.
I know people are excited to hear about this baby. So are we. I feel like unplugging our home phone line and just ignoring the world. I have some wonderful friends and family, and I don't like feeling frustrated towards their excitement; I'm so glad that I have people who care about me and who care about this baby. It's clear that Baby Ash is going to have a lot of admirers and friends when it finally decides to break free (queue Queen music here).
The truth is, sometimes I feel like talking to people and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I feel like laughing about being so overdue, and sometimes I wish people would just calm down and stop asking me (or my husband, mother, father, brother, grandparents, etc) if I've had the baby yet. Honestly, with all the connectivity that exists - especially in the age of social media and my high usage of it - you're going to know not only when we go to hospital but when we have the baby (except from Friday night to Saturday night, sorry folks) pretty sharpish. I'd like to blame my mercurial mood on hormones, but it's more like frustration than anything else.
There's so much else going on in the world - so many people who are in much more dire straits than I am being over my due date - I use that to get back into my happy place. I just wish that I could keep that at the front of my mind when people, lovely as they are, look for baby updates. I hope and pray that this is my last baby-free entry. If not, I can only just keep on trucking, right?
