I am 17 weeks pregnant today. Last week I started to feel the baby kicking and pregnancy finally seemed real to me. Up to that point I just felt insanely bloated and terrible. I started to think that maybe, just maybe someone had made a mistake in telling me that I was pregnant and the doctor had just pushed play on a stock video of a baby moving around in a belly on the sonogram machine. I forgot how much I love it when you can feel the little turnip kicking around in there.
I keep looking down at my burgeoning belly and saying, “Hi.” Like we need to be introduced or something. I don’t feel like I can have a very long conversation with the baby now, not yet. We should start out slow, you know like when you decide you are going to try and have a grown up relationship with a guy, and you tell him you need to take it slow because you really like him and don’t want to screw it all up like usual? Like that. So we are going slow, my baby and I. I have so much to tell it. Where to begin? Do I start for the beginning or the end and work backwards? Do I leave out the embarrassing details? Do I exaggerate to make myself look better? Because I really want this baby to like me. I really do. And since I feel that it is a girl, I want to be her best friend too. I want her to look up to me before she enters her teens and tells me she hates me.
So that is where I am- the early stages of pregnancy and what feels like a new friendship. In the instant of that first kick I felt the urge to hold this baby tightly and keep her/him in there and protect her/him. I think that now that I am a mother of a two year old, I have honed my maternal instincts and instead of only being in awe of the thing called “growing a baby in your tummy and then birthing it and watching it grow up,” I am instead fiercely protective of this process and this time in my life and in my baby’s.
Right before I had Wyatt I watched a Mother’s Day show on Oprah. Yep, picture if you can, my fat belly and my fat ankles lying in bed in the afternoon (still in my pjs) praying that Wyatt would hurry up and get out of my belly, watching Oprah. I was, of course, emotional at the time and cried at everything, but there was one guest in particular who said something that I will never forget. “The only time that your children are really yours is when they are inside of you, the rest of life is learning to let them go.” I think about that almost daily. While Brett thinks it is morbid and pessimistic, I am a realist and a control freak and find it grounds me in reality. This moment right now, is out of my control. Wyatt became his own person the second he was born and I have been watching him grow up and away while simultaneously growing close to his father and me. I make no bones about it - Wyatt is independent and social, but mostly independent. It does make me sad, but I also identify with him, and ironically, my mother. I feel the twangs of separation anxiety I know my mother felt as I did the same to her. Karma. What a bitch. Maybe baby #2 will be different or maybe I will feel differently? Maybe having some perspective will prepare me for what I am sure will be a loving, independent, free spirited, but mostly independent child. I cannot figure out why the things I value most are so painful to see in my own child sometimes. Ultimately, all I can do now is cherish these next few months as I house this unborn child in my belly and get acquainted and promise her/him the world. Hopefully, when the day comes I will be prepared to let her be her/him own person, not just my baby. I really thought that you didn’t have to give your child wings to fly until they were 18? Now, I know differently.
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