The Big Ow.

Now that Ava Leigh is edging into her eighth month, a lot of ladies are asking me if I’m growing apprehensive about her delivery.  I don’t really know what to tell them without my response coming off as indifferent, because situations that anyone with the sense of a goat would worry over, I simply can’t.  I don’t know if it’s a self-preservation mechanism or the inability to wrap my mind around the precariousness of such an event, but something in my brain refuses to speculate over how complicated delivery might be.  This is coming from the gal who was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck like a python.

I compensate by fretting over insignificant things instead.  For instance, finding the perfect shower curtain to match the downstairs bathroom.  Or organizing Ava’s clothes by size, color & theme.  Or making sure that between birth and spring semester, there’s enough put back in the freezer so my husband won’t subsist on deer and Dinty Moore alone.

What else can I do?  How do they expect me to react?  Does it validate someone's painful experience any less if I happen to have no more trouble than a cat?

 I could get really worked up and allow what hasn’t happened yet to gnaw at me like an insatiable squirrel… or I could read as much as possible about what preparations can be made both mentally and physically, and leave the rest in the hands of God and capable physicians.  I’ve been walloped by a lot of things in life that I didn’t see coming – a terrible car accident, divorce, job loss, debilitating depression, a screwdriver to the eyeball (don’t ask) – and can look back and see God’s fingerprints all over those situations.  I’ve always felt extremely blessed and somehow spared the worst of things, perhaps because He knows how truly weak I am.  I trust that childbirth will be no different.