venerdì, luglio 27, 2012

Ren update

Saw the midwife, doctor, OB etc in a flurry last week to get told I'm not as high risk as they'd thought. Well, hurrah and surprise sur-fucking-prise. Same thing the OB in Shanghai told me. Fucking small towns and their small town doctors. Tonnes of chicks get mildly high blood pressure when they get pregnant and push their critters out no problem. And my blood pressure's not that high. Maybe it's all that pre-natal yoga, who knows. Anyways, I get to continue in the midwife programme, which is good. The OB seemed pretty decent but there's just one of her in a region with 60,000 people in it, who get pregnant a lot because there's fuck-all else to do.

(The depression is mostly gone. Being pissed off to be back is still here.)

The midwife told me to make sure Ren's kicking or punching or whatever ten times a day. Ren kicks or punches ten times before I get out of bed in the morning, and has been doing so since Spain masterfully trounced Italy in the Eurocup finals (I was in Rome that night and you could have heard a pin drop. Lovely.) Maybe Ren is a damn considerate kid. It means the rest of the day, I can just sort of enjoy it without having to remember to count. Once in awhile my ribs feel a bit crowded, but it's no big deal.

So far I'm not disappointed by the level of care I've been getting and my go at Midwife Roulette - it's a public service so you have no say in who gets to midwife you - has worked out, all my friends who have birthed here tell me. My midwife does seem pretty nice, and a bit more sensitive than sis-in-law ("early term high blood pressure? Maybe it's a molar pregnancy!" from SIL, versus "oh, your tummy and tits were covered in a rash during the heatwave in Italy? It cleared up? Your palms weren't itchy? Nah, you don't have toxoplasmosis" from Midwife). But I've lost any hestitancy I've had about birthing in Europe for the next one. Too many good stories of good care there, and less out-of-pocket for expenses, even in the case of some friends of ours who moved to Brussels a couple of months or so before the delivery (hey guys).

Bore that in mind when I bought a stroller Mum provided for, gently suggesting our sex life stands a greater degree of recovery chances if I sleep Ren in a bassinet stroller for the first sex months and wheel it out of the room when we get intimate. She gave us $500, the exact cost of a gently used Emmaljunga pram that retails for around $2000. First "deal" I got in Australia. Nobody wants them here. They're too big and clunky for a society so absolutely dominated by the Car - give yourself a hernia getting one of those fuckers in and out of a trunk. But I'm mostly foot-moved myself, working at home and running my small-town errands, and they look like the most comfortable things I've ever seen, and the reviews say they go over snow like it's fucking nothing, which will be important for trips home (poor airlines and their naive promise to transport full-size strollers for free) and important if my lobbying for Berlin works out and we move there in a few years, and if we have the next baby when we expect. A lot of "ifs" for $500, but it's a fucking nice pram. It's actually probably our most attractive material possession. Anyways, I'll let you know in a few months if it's a turkey or not.

mercoledì, luglio 25, 2012

Oh, fuck.

It could be jet lag; it could be my body adjusting to a baby growth spurt/hormones; it could be that I'm monumentally pissed off to be back in Australia, it could be any number of things. My pet theory is that it's going from the middle of the summer, light-wise, to the middle of winter. Whatever the case is, I'm fucking down. Right down. Crashed.

It's freaking me out a little, because of course, while it's here, you don't know when it's going to end. Though for many years now this has just been a passing thing that's cleared up in days or weeks at most, you just don't know when it will lift. It freaks me out more than usual at the moment, when I think of the F-word, so kind and loving, and then think of my grandmother and my grandfather - another kind, loving man, who really sacrificed a lot of his happiness on the altar of Her. On one side I'm petrified of similarly dragging him down with my depression. On the other I'm petrified of him leaving me, as I expect I would have done to my grandmother if I was my grandfather. I don't know which prospect is more utterly petrifying. They're both bloody awful.

Freaking me out even more because now I've got a kicky little baby inside me and I've had enough friends who've had post-partum depression to be petrified of that prospect, too. They all got through; they all bonded with their kids, and love them, and are happy now. They all did a good job. Could I, in that situation? It's hard to imagine not bonding with Ren; the little thing is already filling me with a new kind of love and every little kick and punch is an intense pleasure. When I was in Europe I had all these visions of how I'm going to be, if not a great mum, a mum who tries to be great, and since getting back here I've got so full of inertia and sadness that I just can't kick things into gear.

I'm gonna calm down, eat some SAD appropriate food, and go for a walk in the sun. Mercifully, whatever else Australia's failings are, it does often have sun in the winter.