37 weeks

In two weeks, I will not be pregnant anymore. (I hope.)

How strange it will be, to not feel you wriggling your fingers and toes into my various organs. To not see your little bum protruding above my rib cage. To not be tickled by your hiccups after my meals.

My flesh and blood. Already I'm feeling possessive, thinking about how you will be carried away from my body and passed from one set of eager arms to another.

But you are your own person. I haven't fully become a mother yet, but already I have to get this into my head.

----

Exercise routine: Walking back and forth from City Square mall. Some Pilates moves are too hard on my pelvic bones. Swimming is delightful though. If I had a pool downstairs, I would be in it everyday, letting my bones rest.

Eating: Normal quantities, no special cravings

Listening to: J-boy by Phoenix, Break the Chain by the Pretenders

Discomforts: Really hot at night. Can't sleep without the air-con at 26 degrees. Fingers hurt when I wake up/ leave them in one position for too long. Not much swelling elsewhere. Baby has turned, thankfully, so she is weighing on my bladder when I get up. But I still don't have to pee in the middle of the night, so I have nothing to complain about.

Nesting: I've given up on preparing a pinterest-worthy nursery. For now, my bedroom is ready to receive the co-sleeper, and that's it.

Baby gear: Stroller is in, diapers are in, everything I think she will need for the first week of life is in. We'll have to wait and see what she needs after that.

Feeling: Anxious about wrapping up work by Wednesday. But happy to be taking a break really soon, and can't wait to see the little one.
Last night was an anomaly though. Work anxiety and overall tiredness made my thoughts spiral violently downwards, and it turned into bitterness against k, who was snoring deeply. "You have no interest in the baby's arrival!"was just one of the many irrational things I wanted to say to him when he woke up. That turned into tearful worry that my parents would pass away before seeing the baby, and then what kind of emotions would I have every time I put on the onesies they bought for her? It was only the Holy Spirit that gave me peace and showed all these lies for what they are: lies.

The mind of a tired, hormonal pregnant woman is ripe for panic. I can only imagine what it must be like to be post-natal, stumbling in sleeplessness from feed to feed, with these thoughts wreaking havoc in an idle mind.

It is only God who can give me peace--not anything I read, or anything I prepare, or anything I buy. Nothing and nobody else can help me be a mother. That is the truth I must hold on to in this final stretch and beyond.

A present at 30

Around June this year, I started thinking about turning 30 in a positive way. The twenties no longer felt like a golden era I had to cling on to. I started telling people I was 30 when they asked. Tomorrow, that is what I will be.

I did think, though, that I should do something momentous and cliched to mark the turn of the decade. Perhaps get that tattoo. I thought about trees and roots and words, and then I forgot about tattoos.

But God thought it was time for a body modification too.

I started feeling it in my chest, pms symptoms dragging on a week too long.

On 9th November, I groggily took a pregnancy test first thing in the morning. No spectacles on, teeth unbrushed. Two lines appeared. I took the box out to k, who was already up and trying to submit a paper online. I showed him the box and the test stick.

"What does this mean? So what does it mean? You're pregnant? Don't worry, it may not be accurate."

I would have clobbered him, except I was also unsure that something so cheap could be relied on to tell me the biggest news of our lives. So we shrugged it off and went about our day. In the afternoon I took another test. It was positive too.

Again, we pretended it was false. But we brought home a digital ClearBlue pregnancy test kit, because the more expensive, the more accurate?

It blinked and calculated for a minute, way longer than my cheap tests took.
Finally it decided. "Pregnant."

Humans are strange beings. A printed word is like the News, it just Is. With that word, we finally allowed ourselves to believe and rejoice.

I called my parents. My mum picked up, and I told her to go wake Daddy up. "Why, you're pregnant ah?"She just didn't let me have my moment. Lots of fumbling and phone clicking later, they were both on speakerphone, and I said this big sentence for the first time. "Yes, I'm pregnant."

"Congratulations,"my father said very properly. I wouldn't expect anything less from him.
"Aiya, I knew it,"said my mother.

The next few days were happy ones, telling k's family and my friends, absorbing all the joy that was exploding around us. We went to Choon Kit and we got a gynae appointment at Mt E. I was seven weeks in.

At the gynae's clinic, I was still worried that my test result was a false positive. I did a urine test for the nurse to check, and I was waiting for her response to tell me if I was really pregnant or not. But she glanced at it and tossed it into the dustbin. "First pregnancy?"she asked. That was a relief.

Then finally, we saw it for ourselves on tv. A mass of black, my uterus, which I'd always thought was faulty, and at the top, a blueberry-sized cluster and a tiny blinking dot. Our baby's beating heart. Dr Kek turned the sound on. I felt k melt into my side and lean his cheek on my head. All my worries about him not being in the moment had been unfounded.

I carried that beating heart with us to Tokyo, and I fed that beating heart lots of food. I took rest stops in the middle of our long walks, and went to bed thinking about the beating heart.

Today, our little blueberry is the size of a lemon. The last time we saw it on tv, it was waving its hands about and bouncing. I realized that even while I couldn't see it or take care of it, God was making it grow, and it was busy doing its own thing inside there.

Tomorrow I turn 30, and already I care less about my own birthday than the impending birth of this little one.

Thank You God, for your gift in Your good time. We don't know where we're headed or what You want us to do. But for now at least we know we are to take care of this gift You've given us, and that's more than enough.

 

How was your valentine's day?

I spent mine in a fever, while k was at his cousin's wedding. It was also my mother's birthday, but we were both too under the weather to go out, so my dad bought us tori-q bentos and we spent the night watching a new (old) taiwanese drama about the ethics of honor and saving lives. 

Here then, to celebrate the great love that is my family, is a photograph of my parents in the Philippines in the 70's. They're on the right, looking as seventies as they could ever look. Happy birthday mummy!

Mother to k: Come, stir this.

Mother to me: Quick, take photo of him!

Yesterday was my parents' 31st wedding anniversary. Also bong's and paki's birthdays. But we can only celebrate one thing at a time. So it was my parents' anniversary.