Today I am 31 weeks *takes a big bloated bow* and feel like I’ve swallowed a block of concrete. I’m really stiffening up now, it’s difficult to bend, put on shoes and even simple tasks like getting dressed or going to the loo is taking such a long time and leaves me short of breath.
I’ve really tried to slow things down but at the same time I’m so desperate to have everything prepared I’m feeling more tired than ever and it doesn’t get any easier the further I get into it. I can appreciate when my mum says to me “When you get to my age you’ll realise things aren’t as easy to do as when you were young and you’ll appreciate your good health a lot more.” My heartburn is the worst it’s ever been, I’ve never had it before I was pregnant which makes it so much more difficult to cope with as it’s such a new and extreme feeling like my heart is leaking lava into my chest. I’m glugging back gallons of ice-cold full fat milk, and cooking every meal with huge hunks of root ginger as I was told it’d help but I don’t think it is. At this rate I’ll need a couple of pet cows to keep me in supply of milk.
With all this gorgeous hot weather we’ve had I’ve not been able to go outdoors as it’s actually TOO HOT – wow, there’s a first. Even trying to walk my puppy to the shop to get a paper, or going into town is becoming an uphill battle and I’m coming ever closer to fainting every time I venture out alone. It must look strange from an outsider’s point of view watching a pregnant girl stop in the street and manoeuvre like an embarrassing dad trying to robot dance, to get down and sit on a dirty pavement for no apparent reason. I carry a bottle of aloe vera and avocado spritz in my bag to cool me down when I get a sudden hot flush, which helps keep me conscious I’ve discovered. How strange life can be. 🙂
I’m so excited now I really can’t wait to meet little Millie, I laid in the bath today and she went crazy shuffling about and making ripples in the water, it truly is a magical experience. I’ve got her so many bath toys of boats and ducks and water squirters that I keep playing with, I think I’m the one that’s the baby. If she’s anything like me no doubt she’ll spend half her life in the bath playing as I love water. She can’t kick me so well now that she’s grown so big which is a relief as my kidneys always seemed to take a daily battering from her, but now she’s running out of space in there and my belly is more like a jelly castle shaking and twitching and bending shape as she wriggles around as opposed to being able to see a hard lump where she kicks. If ever there was an appropriate demonstration for a sex education lesson in schools it’d be a fat pregnant young girl wedged in a bath tub with a bulging stomach like a bag full of snakes!
And for an update on the ‘being single’ side of things we still haven’t made any progress. It’s weird because I wish her father would read this and understand how I’m feeling right now, maybe he secretly does and that’s why we don’t talk? I guess it’s a lot to take in, and I don’t fully understand the extent of what it means to be a mother myself, but I’m learning as I go and I hope one day she will appreciate my efforts. Or maybe seeing the pictures of walk-in wardrobes and toys and scans would scare the hell out of any young single boy and ignorance is easier? Who knows?
Well the other day I dropped a CD of the scan pictures around to his house, which he said he wanted to see, and I tucked a page into it about the baby’s development at the time I found out that I was pregnant. It was discussed at the time that an abortion was my only path, as ‘it’ wasn’t alive and didn’t count as a baby and it was all in my head. This insignificant clipping of paper showed how the baby had a heartbeat, measured about 10cm, was beginning to practice breathing and it said the mother could feel it moving. It was as if it were as important as a passport to me, the recognition of the existence of an individual. But I was told not to be silly at the time and to do the right thing. And I did. I kept the baby alive and stood up to my responsibility. Nobody would ever see or feel the reality of it all when I was made to decide this unborn child’s fate in the early days and I desperately don’t want him to hate me for choosing to keep the baby, I want him to see what I was faced with through statistics and figures and facts. Like a schoolteacher telling both sides of an argument and allowing the class to decide which side to take whilst still understanding the opposition.
He hasn’t responded to the pictures or the article and that was some days ago now. Every time my phone rings my heart jumps thinking it’s him, hoping he’s accepted it or that he’s now ready to talk and sort things out. But every time I realise it’s not him my heart sinks and I carry on with my life slowing cutting my ties to sympathy.
It’s such a difficult position to be in and state of mind to rest with. My emotions are AWOL as it is, my mood swings are a nightmare and I’m desperate to have everything in order and sort out my life but it seems I can’t right now because this is hanging over me like a black cloud.
I feel like a child again with my first boyfriend waiting for him to text me to say he loves me every five minutes; only I don’t want him to tell me he loves me, and I don’t want him to be my boyfriend. I just want him to love his daughter.
