Minor observations.

Obviously, this pregnancy is different from my first one in a lot of important ways, but in some minor ways too.

Skin.  My skin is fine but not particularly glowy and perfect.  At thirty-five and a half weeks last time, it was so great that I'd regularly leave the house ecstatically without a lick of makeup.  This time, not so much; but happily, I've again made it this far without stretch marks.

Swelling.  I have only minor swelling, and as a result no carpal tunnel, in my hands at this point.  My rings still slide on and off without unusual effort.  Towards the end of my first pregnancy, I had trouble making a fist and I'd stopped wearing my rings.

Aches.  I have a lot more achiness this time, leading to full-on pregnancy waddle.  I don't remember if I waddled last time, but if I did, I certainly wasn't conscious of it.

So weird how different even the little things can be.  Reminder to self: this is a different pregnancy.

On the calendar.

I'm officially on the calendar at UCSF L&D for an induction on Monday, September 7th, 10AM. I will be exactly 37 weeks along.

Omfgomfgomfgomfgomfgomfg!!!1!!!!

It was as simple as Dr. R making a one-minute phone call at my appointment last week, as D and I traded bug-eyed astonished glances at each other behind her turned back.

As if spurred on by this development, the next day I started having contractions that were mild but uncomfortable and so frequent that I went in to be seen. As I lay there hooked up to the monitor, I wondered ruefully if I'd be admitted, caught unawares in the hospital for a chaotic delivery for the second time, after all these months of quiet, clenched-fist waiting and planning. I wound up being watched in L&D for eight hours before the contractions started to subside and the doctors sent me home with instructions to avoid exerting myself and to stay hydrated.

My number one hope is to come out of this healthy and with a healthy baby, and my second desperate hope is for all this to just -- go -- according to plan, this time. I would dearly love to just be able to pack and prepare at my leisure, drop off my dog with his sitter as discussed, show up calmly at the hospital at the appointed time with a bag carefully packed with all my toiletries and comforts, and be monitored by medical staff from minute one of my fast, smooth, and relatively pain-free labor. No surprises. Please.

Empathy at work.

There's been a lot of buzz on the NYT piece on the difficult workplace culture at Amazon's corporate offices.  I have a lot of thoughts on it, but just wanted to write about the one anecdote in the piece that really surprised me -- the one about a woman who came back to work after her child was stillborn.

It wasn't her experience that surprised me; it was the fact that her story was there at all.  If you hardly ever hear about stillbirth, period, forget hearing about the experience of going back to work after a stillbirth.  In a 6,000 word article, there were only four sentences about it, but that was enough to rattle me.  It hit way too close to home.  (I wrote about my experience here and here.)

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses. 

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”

I don't spend much time thinking about how alienated and unsupported and ultimately fucked over I felt after I went back to work, but when I do, I still get so angry about it.  There was just a total lack of empathy from my leadership.  I could feel that they just felt super awkward about it and hoped that I would just get back to behaving and performing normally as soon as possible, even under circumstances that were difficult (not just personally but professionally).  And when I still wasn't totally normal, less than three months after returning, the response wasn't, hey, you understandably must be having a hard time coping with your grief; it was more like, hey, you aren't performing up to your usual standard, what's wrong with you?

How are you supposed to come back from something like that?  You can't, and you don't even want to -- between your actual loss and the lack of support from your workplace, it doesn't even seem worth the fight.  It takes a long time to recover from losing someone you love, and yet I was expected to take less than a quarter.  When I look back on that time, I can't believe I was able to do even what little I did.  That time felt so, so meager.

Getting close.

Here I am, 34 weeks in, and despite all my superstitious feelings I can't help but nest. It's biological! I am possessed -- some ancient lizard brain switch flipped, and now all I can see are the little things around the house that need to be addressed. Not even all baby-related things, either. Burnt-out lightbulbs. A wobbly chair. Inefficient use of storage space. On my way to do one task, I'll get distracted by another, and an hour later the closet is super-clean and I've forgotten what my original task was.

We're now probably three or four weeks away from an induction date. I'm hopeful but I still don't totally believe. I've allowed myself to buy some things for the Nut and my post-partum self, telling myself that regardless of what happens, my body's going to have to go through the process of recovering after delivering a baby, and what's a few more unused onesies in a drawer already full of them for the last almost two years? What a morbid defense mechanism; I wish I could enjoy this more.

The Nut is doing well so far. I can feel a butt, spine, arms and legs, hands and feet stretching out in there. She is putting on fat quickly and weighs, I believe, about five pounds at this point. I feel much more pregnant than I did even five weeks ago -- t-shirts don't fit quite as well as they used to, my joints don't feel totally stable, and things ache in weird ways. My body doesn't feel like my own, and it's hard for me to discern its limits. D and I are ready for this part to be finished. We'd like to welcome her home and get on with our lives as a threesome, plus dog.