I'm tired of being pregnant. Not necessarily physically, though it would be nice to be able to wear my old clothes again, but more mentally. I'm not good at waiting. If I have an idea, I like to do it right then. I start businesses on a whim, buy new domain names and make websites for ideas that burn in my brain late at night. When I decide to do a thing, I want to start doing that thing immediately. I'll start painting a room at 10:30 pm. Start an RV remodel 10 days before I'm supposed to leave on a road trip. So this waiting thing? This incubation period? I don't really get it. I'm not a preparer, really. I don't research or read books about things before I decide to do them. I sort of jump in with both feet and figure it out as I fall. So I want this kid to just come so I can get to the part where I start figuring it out instead of sitting her wondering how the hell life is going to change, what motherhood will look like for me, what loving a baby even means. It feels like my whole life is on pause waiting for December. I know it'll probably be here before I know it, but in the quiet moments where I'm alone at home with a mysterious creature kicking me from the inside, I just want the wait to be over.
I hear a lot of pregnant women say stuff like, "I can't wait to meet him/her!" and I don't have that and that's not why I want the wait to be over. Perhaps it's a more selfish perspective, or just one from someone who is not a baby person and has never had the desire to "meet" a baby. Our culture feels so focused on the baby. Like motherhood is an afterthought. Like it's no big whoop when a woman becomes a mother. Like it happens every day. And it does, but not to me. I only become a mother once in my entire life, and our culture doesn't have a lot of ritual, celebration, or ceremony surrounding that. Even the celebration you have during pregnancy, a Baby Shower, is focused on the baby. What the baby needs, celebrating his/her new life, getting a metric ton of diapers and baby onesies. And I get that. New life is exciting! We should celebrate it. But I also see mothers get lost in the fray. I see motherhood get lost, the sacred and momentous time that happens once in a lifetime. And then we immediately transition to our society's actual culture surrounding motherhood, which is: DO AND BE ALL THE THINGS. Be a super mom, run a successful business, take the kids to soccer practice, breastfeed for at least a year, do yoga, be fit and sexy and fun, have a beautifully decorated Pinterest house. And really, I like doing all the things, and I'm really good at feeling bad when I don't feel successful (which is almost all the time), so I have a feeling that's going to go over really well.
These posts tend to get really ramble-y and lose focus (perhaps a symptom of pregnancy brain? I hear that's a thing?), so I'll stop before I start talking about something totally and completely unrelated to what I started writing about when I opened this draft. Being pregnant is, overall, a good experience. I don't want it to be over because I've had crazy sickness, or because my body feels horrible, or for any of the bajillion horrible pregnancy side effects my pregnancy app tells me are supposed to be happening to me. No, I just want to not feel like I'm trying to peer into a black hole when I look at what life will be like come December. I just want to buy the damn domain and start building this motherhood website (if we're mixing metaphors. I'm not actually building a motherhood website).
