Almost 40 weeks

40 weeks on Saturday. I can now definitively say that the first and last trimesters are tied in terms of disagreeableness. There is just something so tedious about having all your organs compressed and a baby's head sitting in your pelvis for weeks on end. You can never quite catch your breath, or sit comfortably. Or stand comfortably. Or walk comfortably. More succinctly: I am uncomfortable.

Last time, I was anxious for it to be over, which is why I was ok with being induced at 40 weeks. I wasn't particularly nervous, just impatient. Now I am in the unfortunate position of wishing fervently for it all to be over and also dreading the ending. It's like wanting a reallllly terrible movie to finish, but also knowing that someone is going to stab you as soon as you leave the movie theater. I know that I eventually have to leave the theater. All I can do is hope the assailant has a very small knife. 

Being this pregnant, everyone has started to tell me their birth stories. My mother is a repeat offender. She loves to tell me how she, my aunt and my grandmother all had babies three weeks past their due dates. Her point (I guess?) is that late babies run in the family, though I have explained to her many, many times that no doctor would allow this today. I have also reminded her that dating a pregnancy is a bit more sophisticated now, what with ultrasounds and all. Her response: there's no way that all of them were wrong in their due date calculations and I have no idea what I'm talking about. 

Other than my mother, I don't mind hearing people's birth stories. They are all entirely unique, which I find reassuring. It's also sort of fun to hear about someone's precipitous labor, or their water birth, or the time when the nurses forgot to insert a catheter. I mean, when else do people share this level of personal information with you?! It's highly entertaining. It's also sort of gratifying to see the look of horror on everyone's faces when they learn that I had a c-section after a failed induction that lasted three days. Veterans have their war stories, and I have this, apparently. 

It's so enticing to think that you can predict the future based on what happened in the past. But it almost never works that way. I am trying very hard to accept that I cannot predict how this will go. I don't know if I will go into labor before my c-section date. If I do go into labor, I have no idea what that will be like. And if I do have a c-section, I don't know that it will feel anything like the last one. 

I don't know anything, really, except that I will not be pregnant in October. And amen to that.