I'm due next week and I don't remember being this worried about when I give birth for my previous two pregnancies as I am for this one. Part of that can be explained by what else was going on , with number one I expected to be late and rally for the first timing is less of an issue. With number 2 we had just moved house, I had just started a new job and there were a million other things going on. This one I'm worried.
I'm worried about being ready to fly to the UK, about whether or not my sister in law and her family will be here when the baby is born (or for a brit if that's relevant), the time of day and sorting out the other kids, missibot siyum, holidays and keytana, is it a boy or a girl but there is one thing that worries me more than anything else. What is it going to be like for my husband.
How is he going to react to having a child his father will never meet, a child who will only ever know 3 grandparents. What is he feeling and what is he going through right now. I don't know how to start the conversation. I don't know how to get him to tell me. I don't know how to get him to share anything he doesn't want me to know. He has a lifetime of practice hiding his feelings and even after 10 years of marriage I STILL don't know how to get things out of him unless he decides to tell me. I feel that there are huge parts of his life that he just shuts me out of and some of them I don't care but the important stuff like how he's feeling it really bothers me that he won't let me in. I don't believe that this upcoming birth is not in someways difficult for him and I want to help or at least be there and understand some of it but he just won't let me. I want him to trust me enough to let me in. Yes, I still feel that I deserted him last summer when he was sitting shiva, that I should have been there and I wasn't and I don't think that I will ever get over that or ever know if I made the right choice but I will learn to live with the choices I made.
I feel that in this birth I am trying to please too many people. I can't focus on the birth and the arrival of the baby because there are too many things to focus on and organise for the next few weeks. Tickets, passports, packing, flying, rest of the family and the list of other things to do and sort out seems endless. Actually having this baby seems almost to be getting lost in what at times seems an overwhelming list of things to get done most of which I can't even begin to do until the baby is born.
The only up side to all this is I have kind off stopped worrying about the actual birth and the pain that it will entail because I've been distracted be all this other stuff. I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. I guess it's just a thing.
I don't like not knowing, not being able to organise things and plan when things will happen. I don't like this feeling of being stuck in limbo. I want to know when it will happen and I want to know that my husband is ok and if he isn't I want to know what I can do and what is not ok about him.
I don't want to feel that I have abandoned him again when he needs me. I don't want him to decide that I've got a baby to deal with and don't have time for him. I don't want him to shut me out again.
