ready

I am so ready to meet this boy. I have reached a new level of discomfort in my body this week. Monday's excited, manic nesting led to Tuesday's exhaustion. People sort of exclaim when they see my girth. I'm huge. And I don't have any of those pregnant-women-are-so-beautiful-and-glowy feelings. I just feel like Nell Carter in Gimme A Break, picking up things around the house and shoutin' at everyone while her big hips sway from side to side. Really, that's a perfect analogy. I'm moody and mouthy with my husband and child. I go into work like a bat outta hell and try to hammer out as much as I possibly can without a whole lot of grace or balance. I am up all night long with my miraculous bladder which seems to fill even without consumption and needs to be emptied every two hours, which only then seems to ignite my heartburn which finds me reaching for Tums at four am and wondering how I am going to get comfortable or settled again.

I don't like being moody. I don't like feeling grumpy. They are not natural states for me. I'm an optimist, a smiler, a team player. But some mornings a girl just has to vent. And today is that morning.

Eliana is blissed out with Elmo on the sofa eating frozen blueberries. She certainly doesn't feel neglected. Is this how it's going to be when my little man comes? Eliana cracked out with TV while I drag my disheveled self around the house, breast milk squirting, stinky with a ridiculous, unkempt bun perched on my head?

Where's the glamor? The glow? The calm?

Some days I feel so ready, so perfect, so zen. And then there are mornings like today. My compulsion to wash a red fleece blanket that hasn't left the basement for years was the first random act that hit me today. What a perfect birth blanket! Red, no less. So I hurled myself downstairs with my overflowing laundry basket, a still in bed Jeff asking, what are you doing?, and found the blanket. As I moved through the basement I felt total disgust at all the crap down there. The toys and ski gear and laundry and shoes and books. Hand me down clothes for when Eliana is five. More crap than anyone should ever have.

But I felt paralyzed because I can't do anything about it. I can only bend down so many times before the contractions get crazy. There's no place to put most of it. I've already brought half of it to the Goodwill. And why in god's good name am I writing about this? Perhaps because maybe, just maybe, someone will read this and totally get what a crazy person I am, perhaps have been there, perhaps not think I'm a total nutball.

So I start the laundry and pull myself back upstairs, kicking shoes out of my way. I try not to curse the dirt on the floor of the mud room. I press replay for Eliana and slip back into bed. The sun is bright over Jumbo. The grass green beneath shiny, speckled snow. I hold my belly and smile at the little kicks of this wildman inside me. Know that he is so much more than any out of place object, any layer of dust. Know that I am so blessed, so, so fortunate to be surrounded by this much love both inside and out.