Just Keep Swimming A wife trying to keep a positive outlook on male-factor infertility

Warning… there is lots of tmi discussion of bodily functions in this post.  But we all know that labor isn’t the most beautiful process, so proceed at your own risk!

I’ve been trying and trying to get labor started for the last couple of days.  Thursday night we had bad storms down here, so my good buddy took me to the mall and walked laps with me.  No baby.  But I did start having the most bizarre gas and diarrhea yesterday – the kind you can hear gurgling from deep inside long before it makes its appearance. (Sorry for that…)  I also passed a big blob of dark red gunk and had a lot more clear/white discharge than normal.  So I was starting to think, maybe baby’s on his way!!!  Then last night, Bobby and I walked around Target for a few more essentials – like a mattress for the crib (probably should have one of those??) and then out to dinner.  I was still up and energetic until late last night, and we decided to try some intimacy.  If this is tmi for you, feel free to skip the next paragraph.

We haven’t had sex in….???  It’s been months.  I’m a one-way-ticket kind of girl and there’s only really one key that opens my door, so to speak.  When I first got pregnant, my belly was simply an inconvenience, but it started taking longer and longer for me to finish.  Eventually it became next to impossible, with me straining for over 20 minutes to get there.  So now that I’m full term and massive… you can imagine how productive last night was.  Not only was it awkward – I actually felt embarrassed for my husband to see me naked – but it was frustrating.  We tried everything under the sun, even enlisting a few external aides, to no avail.  And then to top it all off, we spent so much time on me that Bobby couldn’t do his bit at the end either.  I’m a little sad that our last attempt at unrestricted intimacy without children in the house was such a bust.  I also find it kind of ironic that the same act which failed to conceive us a baby also failed to deliver us a baby.  Oh well.

But that hour of fruitless rocking still seemed to have jarred something loose, because this morning I woke up at 5am to pee.  For the first time in months, my nose was dry as a bone and so were my eyes.  (I seem to leak from every orifice these days!)  Bobby came to bed and fell asleep instantly… and at 5:15, the exact time my alarm goes off every day for work, I felt my first contraction.  At first it felt like a regular old Braxton, but then all of a sudden… it hurt!  I laid in bed for a while until I had a few more and thought, maybe I should get up and get ready, just in case.  So I had breakfast, got showered and dressed, did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, and put the sheets on the crib.

I woke Bobby up at 7:30.  I rubbed his shoulder and said “Hey… your son has decided that today will be his birthday.”  He mumbled about contractions and asked if my water had broken, then asked if I needed him to get up right now.  I said I could probably manage without him for a while longer.  And the man went right back to sleep!!!  I guess he should take advantage to get all the sleep he can… but I was expecting him to pop up and freak out or something!  I even turned on the video camera to record his anticlimactic reaction.

Oh well.  There will be enough excitement later today!  I’m still sitting here, timing contractions and trying to gauge when I need to wake up my poor, tired husband and call my doula.  Right now I’m about 5 minutes apart and about 50 seconds long, give or take.  They’re a lot more intense and frequent when I’m sitting than standing.  And I’ve had to stop typing quite a bit during this post to close my eyes and breathe through them!  Well, that’s all for now.  I’ll update you later!

So I went for another check up today… I’m 5cm, 90% effaced, and the baby is at -1 station.  The doctor wiggled her fingers and made the baby’s head bob up and down.  Really people!!!!  SHE ACTUALLY SAID: “Well, I don’t know why you’re still pregnant!!”

Guess it’s time to start walking…

I’ve had a post that I’ve been writing in my head for the last week or so.  It was all about how strangely calm I am feeling about my upcoming labor, and how frustrated I am at the reactions I’ve gotten from people about our choice not to use pain medications.  I also wanted to write about the amazing beach trip we took last weekend.  But I am still so busy from sunrise to sunset that when I do have time to sit down and write, I’m too exhausted to think.  I haven’t even had time to write the letter to that evil apartment complex.  And now, all those topics of discussion are moot because…

I’m 4cm dilated as of Thursday, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that I lost my mucous plug this morning.  Looks like Noodle is coming early!!!!!

I’m still feeling strangely calm.  I always thought I would be terrified of labor, especially of going drug-free, but now that it’s here, I don’t feel the least bit scared. I can’t explain it.  It’s almost as if I have gained this confidence in my body, that it’s been able to grow and develop this baby for nine months without a single piece of help from me, and so it will also be able to deliver it just fine.  It’s almost like an out-of-body experience.  I know I was built for this, and my body will do exactly what it’s supposed to do.  And I’m not afraid of the pain, either.  I actually feel like I’m about to run a marathon, sort of a “let’s DO this!! yeah!!” attitude.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excited about being in pain, I think I’m welcoming it as one more necessary part of what my body’s doing to bring my son into the world.  Of course, I say that now! 🙂

So no, I’m not scared.  I actually am freaking out though, about being “ready.”  The nursery is in SHAMBLES still – crib is still in its box from Ikea, dresser and changing table are half-stained in the garage, no curtains or decorations on the walls yet.  Luckily we have a co-sleeper in our room that Noodle will be using for the first month at least, but still.  I’m not ready.  There are things I haven’t bought yet, like a breast feeding pillow.  My house is a mess.  I haven’t even started making ahead dinners to freeze.  I frantically started packing my hospital bag as soon as I got home from the doctor on Thursday, and have been adding to it ever since.

I thought I had two weeks left!!!

So I’m off to Babies R Us and Home Depot.  I need to return some gifts so that I can buy things online in the colors that I want.  And I need a can of clear coat for the furniture.  Then I’m going to finish staining the furniture (don’t worry, I have a mask) and I’m going to clean my house, and make some spaghetti sauce and burritos to freeze.

And then I’m going to have a baby!

Here’s a picture of Bobby and me at the beach, since I never had time to tell you about the trip.

At the end of March, I received a phone call from the manager of our apartment complex.  She said she might have found someone to rent our apartment, and was wondering if we could have our stuff out early.  I told her we had already moved out all of our furniture, but that we still had quite a bit of things in cabinets and closets to take care of, plus the apartment needed to be cleaned.  She said in exchange for moving out early, she would have the apartment cleaned for us and would give us a credit for the last 10 days of our lease.  She asked us to leave the power on until the lease expired though, for the cleaners and painters.  I was elated – that’s about 350 bucks in returned rent!!  Plus, being eight months pregnant, I was very excited at the thought of not having to clean our apartment.

So Bobby and I rushed over to the apartment the second I got off work and spent the next 7 HOURS loading and unloading our car.  It took us four trips back and forth to the house, plus two trips to the dumpster, to get it all out.  We didn’t finish until close to 11 o’clock at night.  I was exhausted and miserable, and Bobby hurt his back.  But Bobby and I both agreed that it was worth it to get that money back – we had been completely blindsided by the apartment’s $1,600 fee to end our lease early (two months rent) and were so thankful to get even a little bit of that money back.

Well, the check came in the mail yesterday.  It included our pet security deposit and a few other small stipends, but no $350 for our 10 days of early move out.  I called the manager’s office, and she said she never agreed to credit the last 10 days of our lease.  She said she had no idea we still had belongings in our apartment, she thought I said that we were completely moved out.  She apologized, but said there’s “absolutely no way” she could ever have offered a refund.  She thought I was so happy on the phone because she was offering to clean the apartment for us.  (I didn’t even try to fight the fact that she actually charged us $50 for carpet cleaning.)  She said, as if it was supposed to explain everything away, that the new renter even decided not to move in after all.  I wish I could say that there’s a chance I could have misunderstood her, but I remember our phone conversation very clearly.

I called Bobby, who had just started his shift, and told him what she said.  I was so angry and hurt and frustrated that I went into hysterics and started hyperventilating.  It was at that moment that he had to get off the phone – duty still calls, no matter how hard your pregnant wife is crying.  He told me later that he was terrified to get off the phone with me because I was such a wreck, and I feel really bad for scaring him like that.  I’m telling you, these damn pregnancy hormones turn the dial up on every emotion to level 10.

I still feel so angry and depressed.  That day of moving was a horrible, horrible day.  I had to get up at 5am the next morning for work and every bone in my oversized body hurt.  I try SO HARD to make all the right decisions, to do things the right way, and it seems like I always get screwed.  I do the right thing, but my husband’s sterile, and we dropped 18,000 to have a baby.  Instead of getting a huge tax refund from our medical bills, we end up owing taxes instead.  I was shocked to get a second bill from the hospital for another 1,000 to cover the delivery.  Our mortgage closing got delayed and we paid a few hundred extra bucks in prepaids.  The movers ended up costing a couple of extra hundred bucks because they took longer than anticipated.  My dad said he could fix the broken dishwasher, but he broke it worse, and we had to buy a new one.  And of course, the fee of two months rent to move out early.  And now, this.

I figure since there was never any written agreement and we have no proof that she offered us the 10 day credit, we have no way to try and get that money.  There is an address to send disputes about the statement, and I can’t decide if I should write a letter or not.  Does anyone have any advice?

So my best friend came up to visit last week, and I was so glad to have her here! Not only do we not get to spend a lot of time together, but she was totally gung-ho about spending the weekend doing nothing else but painting Noodle’s room, which was a huge help.  She helped me pick out the best blue color that is bright and cheery, and will look amazing with our Dr. Seuss theme.

One thing that I didn’t know about my husband prior to this whole starting-a-family thing is that he can NOT keep a secret.  The idea to keep Noodle’s gender to ourselves was completely his – I went along with it just to humor him.  So it’s ironic that, out of the two of us, Bobby continually drops the male pronouns when talking about the baby!!!  And then he has the most obvious way of covering it up.  “and then if he… OR SHE…” and I just cringe because I know how much he’s giving away! The good news is that 99% of our friends and family actually think we don’t know what the gender is, so any time we slip into the male pronoun, they assume that we’re just defaulting to the more commonly used gender.

Unfortunately, my best friend is in the 1% of people who know that we’re keeping it a secret.  I’ve been pretty sure that she somehow has figured it out though, despite my best attempts at concealing the information.  So the three of us were out for dinner, and Bobby was constantly dropping the “he’s” left and right! A few times he even said, “my son!!!”  When Bestie got up to use the restroom, I smacked him on the shoulder and said “dammit Bobby, if you don’t cut this out, she’s really going to figure it out!”  After laughing and pointing fingers for a few minutes, we decided… let’s go ahead and tell her.  The damage had been done, and with only a few weeks to go, why not?  So when she came back to the table, we just blurted out, “We’re having a boy!”

Bestie was so excited, mostly because she had indeed already correctly figured it out.  So then we chattered for a while about little boy things and my bizarre abhorence for gender-specificity.  Bestie is a firm believer in trucks for boys and dolls for girls, while I believe in a more whole-child approach to gender identity.  Well apparently without a secret to keep, Bobby withers up and dies.  Because not ten minutes after revealing the gender, Bobby does the unthinkable – he refers to Noodle by his NAME!!!

LUCKILY Bestie, by some miracle, didn’t happen to catch it.  So the name is still under wraps.  But seriously people – my husband can never be given top secret clearance on anything! I’m telling you, give him one beer and he’ll start spilling state secrets.  I guess it’s sort of cute that he’s just so excited to meet his son that he can barely contain it!  I just find it funny that this whole thing was HIS idea to begin with, and he’s the one who can’t keep his lips shut! Sheesh.