Labor

I had contractions all day yesterday. Sporadic, nothing that would make me start timing them but contractions nevertheless. I woke up in the middle of the night with terrible pain and wondered if this was it. But, here I am again this morning and everything seems to have subsided.

I have thought about labor quite a lot these days. It is so painful, so agonizing. I chose to have natural, unmedicated labors with both Ella and Zane knowing that even though it would be hard that it might be better for both myself and my children in the long run. In the midst of the pain I questioned all of that and realized you just had to get through it the best you could. I wonder if with Sully I will want to feel the pain - physical pain to match the torturous emotional pain of these past months. But then I hear my midwife's words, "you can't do physical pain and psychological pain at the same time," and I find myself agreeing. Sometimes I think I want to go in and be as medicated as possible - that I want to just sleep through it all and wake up to the words "it's over".

At our appointment yesterday we listened for a long time to Sully's heartbeat. It was different. Slower. After a while it did come back up to what it had been in the weeks past but things are changing. If this had been Ella or Zane, my midwife would have put me on a monitor to check the stress of the baby. She explained that a deceleration can happen normally but that under other circumstances it would have been closely monitored. I guess that is part of the ease of Sully. There is no stress or worry about fetal monitoring or fear of his demise. He is held so loosley in our grip, the past 20 weeks making us peel one finger after another off of his winged life. Open palmed we hold him knowing he will leave us when the days ordained for him come to an end.