Baby Steps

I keep wondering if giving birth is going to turn out to be a lot like running a marathon.  I have a lot of time to wonder about this because I can no longer make it through the hours between 2am and 6am without being awake for at least three of them.  This overnight wakefulness is not a new feature of my pregnancy, and waking up during this period plagued me even before I became pregnant... but the length of time I'm awake and the discomfort I feel during this period have gotten much worse in the past few weeks.  I wake up needing to go to the bathroom.  Then I'm nauseous and hungry, even if I've risked heartburn by eating a snack before bed.  Then I'm still nauseous.  Then I cannot get comfortable, no matter how I sit or lie.  It's as though I am mentally strong enough to put my discomfort out of my mind during the day, but after I put my brain to rest for several hours, my body insists on calling attention to the fact that it has a full sized infant body inside it and that this state of being is not particularly pleasant for either of us.

So sometimes, when I'm not sleeping, I worry about how bad labor is going to be.  Then I get to thinking, even if it is miserable, it means the end is in sight.  Even if I have a whole slew of sleepless nights ahead of me, they will be of a different kind.  So maybe pregnancy will turn out to be a lot like marathon training.

When I was training for a marathon back in 2003, I spent the entire time unsure whether I would actually be able to finish the race or not.  As a result, I didn't miss a single one of the miles prescribed by my four month training program.  Even then, I was worried about the longest training run being over six miles shorter than the race.  What I didn't realize was that the daily rigors of preparing for the race would turn out to be much harder to endure than the race itself, at least for me.  If you can run 20 miles on your own through the empty streets of Valparaiso, you can most definitely run 26.2 miles alongside thousands of other people through the cheering crowds of Chicago.  The race itself, while much harder on my body than any single training run, was fueled by the adrenaline of finally making it to race day, the encouragement of the people I knew, and the excitement of knowing the finish line was finally in sight.

People think of a marathon as a long race because it's 26.2 miles long.  I thought of it this way, too, before I trained for one.  The marathon turned out to be a really long race, though, because on the first day I laced up my shoes, I had over 350 miles left to run before I reached that finish line.  Looking back, its no wonder I made it through the last 6.2 miles of the race that carried me beyond my longest training distance.  I'd already survived the difficulty of the 350+ that preceded them.

Pregnancy and marathon training are not exactly the same because pregnancy doesn't take the same kind of determination.  You can't wake up and think "No thanks, I will pass on being pregnant today because I feel miserable" before rolling back over.   You could, theoretically, wake up and decide "It's 5am, I will pass on getting up to run these eight miles before class" before rolling back over.  For me, though, the determination was never the problem.  I am so determined that it takes more effort for me to quit on something than to stick with it.  The thing that is hard for me is enduring the strain that possessing this kind of determination puts on me and my body.  And enduring my pregnancy has been at least as hard as enduring marathon training.

It might be really naive to think giving birth will be comparable to running the race.  Maybe labor will be so hard that I'll look back on things and think compared to childbirth, pregnancy was a breeze.  But I choose to ignore this possibility for now because worrying about it will do nothing to help me get through the obstacles that still stand before me.  What will help me get through the discomfort of these sleepless nights, and through labor, will be thinking of the birth as the last few painful steps in a long, difficult battle of endurance-- the only remaining steps I will have to take before someone hands me a baby.  Because while there is a lot of uncertainty at play here, I do feel confident that, as great as it was to be handed a finisher's medal and a foil blanket, being handed a baby will be much better.

(I don't know anything about this book, Baby Steps, but that felt like it had to be the title of this post.  And I don't care what this book is about, frankly, because it's nearly 5am and I'm finally feeling like I might be able to fall back asleep.  Goodnight!)