Overdue Day 13- The End of Freedom

Okay, so I skipped a week of writing. But the end as come. One day shy of 42 weeks and my doctor seems worried. “What do you think you should do?” She asks me non-objectively. I fall for this every time. She knows what I need to do, so why is she asking?

“I think we should wait until Monday,” I say, truthfully. I figure that gives me time to put the finishing touches on the first draft of my Tween novel and allow Jack to come on his own.

“Oh, Julie, I don’t think you should do that. I think we need to induce tonight.”

“Tonight, you mean hours from now?”

“Yes. I’ll call the hospital and find out when they have an opening. Don’t worry. We do this all the time. Everything will be okay.”

She proceeds to insert her hand up into what seems to be my bowels and tells me my cervix is high and barely open. She’d love to wait longer, but there are dangers. Fluids are getting lower, and 42 weeks is really the cutoff.

I couldn’t help but feel as if I’d just been told I only had hours to live. I know that sounds morbid, but I had a whole to-do list for today. My best friend laughed when she heard this. You better add “birth a baby, in red, to that to-do list.” I get her point. That’s a little more important than cleaning out the silverware tray, even though there are crumbs in it. “Will I be able to do that once I have a baby?” I asked her. “Probably not, but that’s okay,” she said, then added, “I cleaned mine out yesterday.” She doesn’t have kids.

On the way out of the building I was walking next to a fun chatty couple who had left my doctor’s office. They asked about my baby, and I broke the cardinal rule of asking her if she was pregnant. She told me she had three teenagers. She said I have no idea how much I’m going to love this baby once I hold him. “It’s like the Grinch,” she explained. “Your heart beats outside of your body.” Ironically I’d heard Al Roker say the same thing on the Today show a few days ago.

Before we split off, she said that I’ll lose about 40 pounds in one day while breastfeeding. “Uh, honey, it didn’t happen that fast,” her husband confided. “Don’t get her hopes up.”

So here I go, off the give birth, somewhat artificially. Wish me luck.

Overdue- Day 6- Pre-Partum Depression

I’ve met so many women who tell me they loved being pregnant. I can’t say that I’ve loved it, which makes me question my maternal nature. My husband says it’s hindsight with these women. But I have to say, while pregnant I have had no headaches, few body aches, and I’ve felt fairly sane and happy the entire time. I dread the return of PMS days, and I’m sure my husband isn’t going to welcome them either.

But I can’t help but be a little blue with this overdue business. I’m not dilated, the baby hasn’t even dropped, my cervix isn’t favorable for induction, and the baby is very large. “Larger babies are difficult to remove by c-section,” my sister tells me. Great. Even harder to push out  I'm sure. So what, it just stays in there and I become famous and have my own reality show? The popular book The Happiest Baby on the Block talks about the so-called Fourth Trimester. Well, Jack is having his fourth trimester inside the womb. Does that mean he will come out more advanced?

Meanwhile, my legs are so swollen it’s hard to sit down or step to into the shower. I have to grunt when I stand up. Relatives are getting worried. They don’t call as much, or if they do they talk to my husband. I’m hesitant to go anywhere even though I’m sure nothing is going to happen.

How do you birth a baby that is probably 9 pounds? I know people do it, but can I? My best friend can’t believe it. “That’s a lot of Kegels you’re going to have to do,” she quips. “How did the baby get so big,” I asked my doctor. She tells me I had more weight gain than I should have and that older women have bigger babies. If that doesn’t trigger pre-partum depression then I don’t know what does.

Overdue Day 5-Waiting on Contractions

I would love to know what a contraction feels like. I’m starting to feel like I will never go into labor. My theory is, if my body is sluggish about producing the hormones to make my period start, then who’s to say it’s not taking its sweet time with Oxytocin production?

For my cycle, there are always herbs to jumpstart the process. And when we wanted to have a baby there was Clomid. Apparently, there is no magic herb for helping Oxytocin production. Only Pitocin given in the hospital which does not sound gentle at all and can send a woman into days of slow labor, often resulting in the c-section which is what most of us try to avoid.

There are certain stimulants for Oxytocin production. Nipple stimulation—only five hours a day should do it. But I get strange looks in Trader Joe’s when I have a basket in one hand and my other is caressing a boob. So I’ve found that using the breast pump is quite fun and the practice can’t hurt. Something else I tried, picture this… I’m in my bra with clothespins on my nips, bouncing on the yoga ball. You can even read or talk on the phone while you do this. 

Overdue- Day 4- Walk Walk Walk

I took a class with a doula who recommended walking five miles per day, so now that I was overdue I amped up my walking. I’d been working out at the gym up until about my ninth month, but now I wasn’t so sure my water wouldn’t break and make the treadmill slippery, causing me to fall face first on the treadmill. So I started going to the park and walking around and around and around the track.

People often talk to me out of the blue since I’m pregnant. The belly is an attention getter, so now I understand what’s behind all of these Hollywood attention-seeking stars getting pregnant. This particular day I was briefly chatted up by a young, handsome, European man who was at the park with his son who was about three years old. He wanted to know when I was due. Four days ago, I told him. He agreed that the waiting is very difficult, so I assumed his wife had been overdue. I didn’t have much to say to him because he seemed so confident with parenthood and here I was a nervous wreck.

He wished me luck and went on with his day. “Larkin!” he called out to his boy. Larkin. Another arty name. Hearing this made me question our name choice of Jack. Larkin Brennan. See it doesn’t work! My husband has asked me only yesterday if I thought Jack was too simple. But weren’t we simple? Here you have a gorgeous, stress-free European man in the park in the middle of the day probably because his wife is on a modeling shoot or some other glamorous job. They can name their kid Larkin.

Overdue Day 3- The SALAD

My husband and I had secretly wanted him to be a few days overdue so we could try THE SALAD. A nationwide phenomenon for inducing pregnancy, it just so happened to be about a mile walk from our residence. An average of 5-10 waddlers per day eat this salad, and many of them report going into labor shortly after. You walk in, sit down, and the servers know exactly what you are there for. They bring you a journal in which you can record your story. I was a little worried when I saw spaces left for follow-up after most of the entries that were not filled in. But, how can you come out to eat with a new baby? That’s why none of these are filled in.

My doctor poo-pooed the salad saying it was a marketing scheme. He had a received a bottle of the dressing as a joke. “It’s just balsamic vinegar,” he said. Our server insisted it was the plant derivatives in the dressing. I speculated it was the tons of Gorgonzola on this mound of a salad after 10 months of eating no soft cheeses. “What it’s going to do is make you feel a little sick,” the server said in the tone of a doctor. “Then you’ll go into labor.”

She was right about one thing. It did make me feel sick. Or, rather, like I had indigestion. All this gas must be what gets labor started, I thought. This crazy salad is going to work!

Around three a.m. some things were expelled but not a baby, and the next day I felt fine. I ate the leftover salad for breakfast, figuring I had to eat it all for it to work. Well, as you probably guessed, it did not work. I hated to prove that the salad in my hood did not work for overdue, suffering mothers. So it was on to the next urban legend.

Overdue- Day 2- Where’s Jack Anyway?

Okay, this is fun. Everyone is calling me to ask if I’d had Jack yet. I impress them with my knowledge that only 3 percent of babies are actually born on their due dates.

Jack is what we’ve been calling our baby since about the second month. We tried so many names to fit with the last name Brennan. I’d always dreamed of an arty, hippy name like Rain if it was a boy, or Summer if it was a girl. But if you could see my husband and me you’d see that a typical white Anglo name probably works best. And if Jack has any “cool” factor whatsoever, he probably will get it from friends. We could be best defined as geeks, which are in right now, so I suppose that makes him cool by default.

When we found out it was definitely a boy, and it is DEFINITELY a boy, we had to forget about Summer and focus on boys’ names. Being the lit major, I sought writer and character names for inspiration. I came up with Auden. Auden Brennan. How highbrow. Add a Lee in the middle to give it a Southern flare. Auden Lee Brennan. This lasted a while until my best friend said it sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to pronounce Arden. She would mock Arnold, saying, “Auden, Auden Brennan. Please come to the main office.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said. And on we went to Irish names. We’d been to Ireland only months before and deemed it a dream world. In fact, Clare would have been Summer’s middle name, as in County Clare. But for a boy, we liked Collin or Connor. Connor Brennan. That works. So does Collin Brennan. People agreed it was a very nice name.

A very nice name wasn’t quite what we wanted. Names need a reason, and Collin and Connor didn’t have a reason. We started thinking of family names. Howard- no, Elliot-there was already a family baby with that name. Robert- yes, my Dad and my husband’s best friend. John- well, that’s my husband’s first name, his Dad’s first name, and our nephew’s middle name. Is there a variant? Jack. Jackson. Oooh, it is reminiscent of the South, my heritage.  Jackson Square, Stonewall Jackson- oopse, I mean Andrew Jackson. Jackson Robert Brennan. That’s nice. Jack Brennan. Friends agreed it was a strong, weighty name with an IT factor. A lot to live up to.

In the shoe store, the sales girl was asking what his name would be. Jack Brennan I told her.

“I like it. Sounds like a guy that would clean my chimney,” she said.

“I hope he turns out to be more than a chimney sweep,” I replied.

 “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean it’s the kind of guy that always wears jeans.”

I stopped her from putting her Sketchers Shape-ups even deeper into her mouth, although it gave me something to think about. But at this point, Jack had stuck. And boy was he stuck.

Overdue- Day 1- The ol’ due date IS a myth…

Back in July I was 2 weeks over my due date. I wrote about it, but didn't know blogging was so easy. So I'm publishing these first before I start talking about my first few months of motherhood...

It was marked on the calendar and served as the deadline for all life order to be completed in my household. It was one week past the halfway mark of the year, which seemed like a good time to be born. His sun sign would be Cancer, and my friend tells me Cancers are nice people. But the day ended and no signs of expulsion from the womb.

I gloated at the thought of telling all the people who said, “You’re going to come early” that I was now overdue. Most of these were what I call “pro moms" who have at least three children and have been mothers for a long time... not people like me who knew nothing of babymaking until that positive pregnancy test nine months ago. These were the people that had very little to say to me until now. Finally we could relate on something.

I always thought the doctors had my due date wrong. They didn’t seem to think much of it when I told them, saying “We just calculate from the date of your last period.” That’s easy. October 1. But you see, I’m one of those people who doesn’t ovulate like everyone else. Some may think I’m lucky, but I have had 4-period years! Yes, that deserved a big woo-hoo! at the time. But right now, it’s not making my life any easier. I have a feeling my due date is one week off ( I remember that night, mm-hmm). So I’ll give it another week before I really start complaining.

I’ll spare you the details of THAT NIGHT, but I ate my pineapple as instructed 6-10 DPO in order to aid conception. And like clockwork, which my body never follows, I became pregnant and found out on Halloween. I fooled everyone with faux gin and tonics at the party. The glow was great, and my body still slid into a slinky black costume, a costume that wouldn’t make it past my swollen calves at the moment.

Thinking back, I should have known something was wrong at our three- year anniversary dinner a few days before Halloween when I sent back my lobster dish at Gordon Ramsey’s London because it wasn’t to my liking. The waiter returned it saying, “That’s the way it is supposed to be.” Now in my right mind, I can only imagine Gordon Ramsey yelling in the kitchen “What do you mean it’s not cooked right, the dumb cow!”