The week before...

(posted after the fact...)

Right before giving birth, I honestly felt pretty normal--albeit a bit crabby. About a week before going into labor, I finally hit the point where I just didn't want to do very much. The timing was rather inconvenient because my family was about to visit, and I had done little to prepare for this. I was really grateful that school was already out because I would have had a hard time working through the crabbiness. I think the fact that the holidays were coming up helped distract me a bit from how I was feeling emotionally--there was just too much going on to really dwell on things.

I didn't have a whole lot of expectations one way or another. Since this was my first time giving birth, and I had no idea what to expect, I pretty much spent a lot of time NOT thinking about it too much. I spent as much time as possible trying to surround myself with calmness. That helped keep me from being too anxious. It was also nice to NOT have tons of people around asking me, "are you having contractions, yet" or whatever... Yeah. That doesn't help.

Like I said, the main thing I felt in the week leading up to labor was a pervasive crankiness. It didn't take much to get on my nerves that last week. I was really annoyed, and totally hated being out in public or around people. Then again, I tend to feel that way *much* of the time, although not as acutely. I would stand as far away from other people as I could, and if I could have achieved invisibility, I would have gone for it. That's not likely anyway, considering I was about the size of a barn by then. Maybe it's a kind of distancing that you do to prepare for labor--wanting to hole up by yourself in a cave somewhere...I don't know...For me, pregnancy was a time of solitude, of wanting to be alone a lot, and towards the end, the solitude I craved had the feel of something purposeful that would prepare me for what was coming.