< Part 1 (Preparation) / Part 3 (Ready! Set! Wait!) >

I know it’s considered “normal” to give birth any time within the 38 to 42 week window. What I’ve never been sure of, is if that window is so big because the actual date of conception is so often an unknown. In my case, we were actively trying to get pregnant and I was charting my basal body temperature. I knew when I ovulated, and therefore knew the date of conception. So M’s “estimated due date” was very accurate, but only if she decided to come at 40 weeks. As I drew closer to 38 weeks, I knew I should pack my hospital bag, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I still don’t know why. I passed week 38, then 39, and there was nothing going on. I had the occasional Braxton-Hicks, but those had been around for a while.

To complicate things further, my brother-in-law and his wife were serendipitously coming into town for a wedding, and would be around for roughly the week before and after M’s due date. They live a 9 hour plane ride away, so we wouldn’t be seeing them any time soon after this visit. I desperately wanted M to arrive while they were here, so they would have a chance to meet her.

The 40 week mark was a Friday, and as I entered that week, I experienced so many emotions. I was anxious and scared, excited to finally meet my baby, desperate to not be huge and pregnant anymore, worried about what my new life would be like and how I would handle losing so much of my freedom.

I was strangely serene about the prospect of labor – most of the time. The one thing that really worried me was that M was posterior (meaning she was head down, but her back was against my back). This is the worst position for giving birth, and can also cause the dreaded back-labor, where you don’t even get relief in between contractions. My back and hip pain forced me to sleep in a recliner for months, so she was posterior with good reason. This caused me no end of anxiety, but it was physically unbearable to sleep in the bed, so I resigned myself to the recliner and all the possible complications that come with a posterior baby. (She might have been posterior anyway, but the recliner pretty much guaranteed it.)

Around 11:30 on Tuesday night, as I was getting ready for bed, M started thrashing about wildly. She’d been movin’ and groovin’ in there for a long time, but this was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It looked like she was shooting a kung-fu movie, and I jokingly referred to these spasms as “stomach-quakes”. After a while, the roiling around was accompanied by sharp jabs to my cervix, and I had the thought that maybe she was dropping. Once she dropped, it would be much harder to get her out of the posterior position, so I started leaning forward on my bed, the birth ball, staying on hands and knees – in short, doing everything I could to encourage her to turn anterior. Her gymnastics continued until about 1:30 AM, when I was finally able to get comfortable and fall asleep. For first-time moms, it’s very common for the baby to drop well in advance of labor, so as I drifted off, I was fairly certain I wasn’t going to be seeing my little baby anytime soon.

Part 1 (Preparation)
Part 2 (Warming Up)
Part 3 (Ready! Set! Wait!)
Part 4 (Ready! Set! Wait Some More!)
Part 5 (Are We There Yet?)
Part 6 (I Think I Can, I Think I Can, I Think I can)
Part 7 (A New Life Begins)
Part 8 (Epilogue, For Me)
Part 9 (Epilogue, for my daughter)