Seconds

Being pregnant with a second child is very different from being pregnant with the first. So much so that I'm half-worried I'll forget to go into the hospital when I go into labor. You know, I'll be busy and preoccupied with other things, and it just won't seem that important. Oh, yeah, having a baby. I'll call the midwives any minute now, really, just give me a sec to track down Cassie's other shoe and check the weather online and get in one more load of laundry and maybe write a quick blog post. And one thing will lead to another, and the head will be crowning, and I'll be wishing I'd gotten around to sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor because now it's all gritty under my butt.

I'm actually a little concerned that as a firstborn myself, I'm not ideally cut out to be the mom of a second child. What if I still retain all kinds of long-repressed resentments of the intruder into familial paradise that was my little brother? What if I hold second-childness against my own second child? (Not that my transition to being a big sister was particularly rocky, I don't think. If so, it doesn't show in the home movies, anyway. Plus I think my mom would have said something.) I guess it really is a bit early to say. I'm hoping that as this sort of theoretical child, represented currently as a fat belly and finally ebbing nausea, becomes an actual child, I'll get substantially more excited about it. At the moment, though, I'm uncomfortably ambivalent.

Babies are boring, for one thing. They're dumb little blobs that don't do anything but make noise and stink.

I think I might not have always felt this way. I seem to remember, actually, when Cassie was a newborn, feeling a kind of pity for the parents of those large, ungainly 9-month-olds, and certainly for parents of (shudder) toddlers, all huge and rough and loud and horridly un-cute. Thinking back, it may well be that I have consistently maintained an impressively delusional sense that whatever age Cassie is right now is the very best age that a child could ever be, and a conviction that babies and children in other age categories are simply inherently less lovely. So it happens that right now, 3 1/2 is the fabulous age, the pinnacle of childhood greatness. But I am starting to realize that it is possible that I am not quite entirely impartial on the subject.

So can I count on it happening again? When this one is born (in early March-ish), will I find myself with a sudden sureness that neonate and 4-year-old are the two perfect ages? Man, I hope so.

I remember that before events like moving, or going off to camp, or going off to college, somebody would reassure me that I would make new friends. And I would feel this great indifference, shading into distaste. I don't like people I don't know, I would say. And I guess theoretical babies are really not much different from theoretical friends. I don't like babies I don't know. They're stupid and boring.

At least I have had a few brief moments, split seconds when I've felt excitement about this whole new unknown human who's going to be joining us, along with a pure and sweet love and protectiveness. I had an ultrasound* a few weeks ago, and seeing the little face and limbs and brain and beating heart gave me a rush of that feeling. (Those right-to-lifers who set up "pregnancy crisis centers" and then get conflicted pregnant girls in for an ultrasound right away definitely know what they're doing. It really makes the pregnancy feel less abstract.) And I've had a couple other moments, too, here and there. Even just listening to the fetal heart tones on doppler in the midwife's office helped. And also when Cassie's teacher said that Cassie is talking about this as "her baby" ("Is it your Mama and Daddy's baby, too?" the teacher asked. "No," said Cassie breezily, "just mine.")--I guess because hey, if this baby is Cassie's, too, then it's not an interloper, it really belongs.

Then there were a couple of days a week or so ago when I was feeling some uterine contractions, and it freaked me out, thinking I might be at risk for miscarriage. I spent nearly two days depressed and paralyzed and crazy miserable before I finally called my midwife, and she asked me a couple questions, then said all kinds of reassuring things, including that she was almost certain that the pregnancy was not threatened. Whereupon I felt like singing and dancing and laughing and crying all at once. And then a few days later, I had a very vivid and realistic dream in which I innocently went to the bathroom, and then there was all this blood on the toilet paper, and I got hysterical, and woke up with my heart pounding. So, you know, maybe I do actually care a little bit about this pregnancy.

I don't know. I guess I just have to trust it's going to work out. It really doesn't happen all that often that a mom truly doesn't like one of her children. I guess it's not unheard of, but the odds are probably on my side. I just hope this kid isn't stupid and boring.



* For Early Risk Assessment--have you heard about this? It's new since the last time I was pregnant, so I hadn't known much about it. They do a certain set of measurements--of nuchal translucency--on ultrasound, and perform a couple of particular blood tests, and factor in your age and some other stuff, then they calculate a risk for Down Syndrome as well as Trisomy 13 & 18. So then you can decide whether you want to go ahead and have an amnio. Based on the results, this kid has a 1 in 125 chance of having Down Syndrome and a 1 in 3137 chance of having Trisomy 13 or 18, so I'm going to skip the amnio, especially since I think I probably/maybe/definitely/possibly wouldn't decide to terminate if there were Down Syndrome anyway. In a backwards way, it might even be easier not to know for sure.