elbow room

milo seems to have discovered his elbows, and boy, are they bony. like spikes, i tell you. it's fabulous. it seems a shame i need to be sitting down to work, because being hunched over does not give him much room in which to swing those bony knobs. i'll try to make it up to him tonight with a good walk.

i could use a little mental elbow room myself. it has suddenly hit me how soon milo could be out, and i'm feeling a little panicky. if something were to happen and he were to be born tomorrow, i would hate, hate, hate to have to send my mother-in-law to my house to get my things, because she would have to go up to our bedroom, with the nightstand overflowing with used syringes (good thing you don't have to have a home study before you're allowed to give birth), and the truly serious ring in the bathtub, and the alarming number of polka dots on the floor (why is our yellow carpet a magnet for sock fuzz???). justin cleaned up downstairs yesterday, so we're neat and tidy, but we're not clean in the way that i'd like to be. floors need to be scrubbed with vinegar solution (tempered with lavender, so milo's nose doesn't twitch), and cabinets need to be wiped down and the refrigerator cleaned and the radiators hosed out with the little vaccuum attachment thingy, and all things porcelain need to be washed with a bleach solution. is this the nesting urge? it doesn't feel happy and hopeful; it feels more like desperation fueled by an overwhelming desire to not come home from the hospital to dirty sheets and the certainty that if the house isn't clean when we come home that it won't be truly clean again for a long, long time. the whole thought is depressing and makes me feel tired...which isn't conducive to actually getting the cleaning done the way i want it.

and look at the ticker: 40 days! and that's just if we stick it out to the 40-week due date, god help us all. i'm pretty invested in 1 august at this point, which is the 38 week mark and only 26 freaking days away. i don't want to rush milo, but i'd be okay with 37 weeks, too...except that 37 weeks is LESS THAN 20 DAYS AWAY!!! how did this happen? how did i all of the sudden become imminently expectant???

it's weird - i never felt this way with hans, not at this point anyway. i never felt this close. i was so fucking depressed those last weeks of that pregnancy - did i not feel any hope because i was depressed, or did i understand on some level that i was not going to get to actively parent hans and that understanding depressed me? sometimes, when i lean toward the former theory, i feel weighted down by a certain guilt that it was my loss of faith that killed hans, that somehow my depression was chemically communicated to him, killing his will to live. it's not rational, i know. but in my gut i sometimes suspect it's true, that my crazed ponderings are right and science as a whole has got it wrong.

and maybe it's that suspicion that fuels my current optimism, my hope for milo's safe arrival: i shoulder the responsibility of expecting him into a live birth. if i don't plan on him, expect him, visualize his live delivery like some kind of junked-up victim of a sports psychologist, i will not experience a successful pregnancy outcome. and here i thought i left the spo mentality behind a year ago. aw, shucks. i felt pretty good about my optimism until i realized it was fueled by my underlying and crazed sense of fatalism.

will milo's birth make any of it any clearer? i know fellow parents-in-loss whose subsequent babies have made the loss of the earlier child more acute, while for others a subsequent birth has been incredibly healing. i hope to fall into the second camp. i could use the clarity.