Week 21

So, I haven't blogged in a while, and that's for a couple of reasons. First, I'm horrible at finishing big extended projects, and second, I really didn't feel very pregnant once the first trimester ended. My morning sickness and fatigue went away, and my body seemed to have completely adjusted to the little guy growing inside me. Unfortunately, though, I've picked up a whole new load of symptoms all at once in this past week-and-a-half.

The most noticeable to me is the lack of sleep I'm getting during the night. I usually wake up once, sometimes twice, to go to the bathroom, and if it's not to go to the bathroom, it's because my hips are killing me from sleeping on my side. For the past few days, I've improvised by moving to the couch for the back support and by shoving a pillow between my legs, but I miss my husband! He gets home from work only an hour or hour-and-a-half before I go to bed, so I really appreciate the cuddle time I have with him at night. Buying a body pillow will be a "must" on my to-do list for this weekend.

Other symptoms have just popped up within the past week or two. Back pain is a big one. I find myself sitting down a lot more frequently than usual at work, because it hurts to walk around for long periods of time. Another is bleeding gums. I am now using Listerine three times a day because I read that "pregnancy gingivitis," if left untreated, can cause pre-term labor. Apparently, the mouth bacteria also travels to the amniotic fluid. A third is increasing pressure on my bladder. I had read about pregnancy incontinence, but I completely thought it was a myth and that there was no way it would happen to me. Wrong. I sneezed a couple of weeks ago while walking into Subway and peed my pants a little! So embarrassing. Sneezes really scare me now. Another, and probably most horrible so far, has been a hemorrhoid. I really freaked out about it, and unfortunately, a friend informed me that hers didn't go away until weeks after she gave birth. The worst.

Another big symptom has been my emotional instability. Along with my growing bump, more and more questions have begun to come from people who notice it. I can't begin to express how excited I am about meeting my baby, and Mike and I put a lot of thought and planning into making sure I would give birth before he deployed, but thinking about that time getting closer and closer has started to make me really anxious. Seeing my friends care for their infants, and noticing all the preparation and thought that goes into every single step they do, makes me so nervous to do it on my own for six months. It seems like they know exactly what to do and when to do it, and I'm just scared that it won't come as naturally for me. I know I'll do it and that if there is any time in the baby's life that's most conducive to Mike's being gone, it's those first six months, but I just have so many mixed emotions about it. I know, though, that when that baby is finally here, it all will seem so worth it.

On a positive note, I started feeling the baby move at about 15.5 weeks! For those of you who haven't been pregnant before, most first-time moms usually don't start feeling kicks until between 18 and 20 weeks. It made sense after my 18-week ultrasound, though, because our baby weighed about 9 oz. at that point. Of course, I always forget my questions once I'm sitting in front of the doctor, so when I got home, I Googled the average weight for an 18-week-old fetus, and found that it's 6.7 oz. I freaked a little, wondering if that meant I would be likely to give birth to a giant, but everything I've read says that all babies grow at different rates and that I shouldn't worry. He may have just gone through a little growth spurt. The doctor said all other measurements were right on target for my September 5 due date.

Speaking of "he," it's a boy! We were actually very surprised to see his "turtle" on the ultrasound because we had convinced ourselves it would be a girl. In fact, we had not picked out one boy's name and we're still having trouble coming up with any we can both agree on. Suggestions are very welcome!

My freshman students at school claimed they had known it was going to be a boy for weeks. It's funny to listen to all the pregnancy jargon they're so familiar with, including "you're going to be all belly" (spoken by a boy), and "oh, you're carrying so low; it'll be a boy for sure." So many of them seem to be veterans on pregnancy. I have lots of freshmen whose mothers, sisters, aunts, etc. are expecting, and others who are expecting, themselves. Unfortunately, it hasn't seemed uncommon lately to see 15 and 16 year-old girls roaming the hallways with baby bellies. I recently spoke with the school social worker about the number of students this year who seem to be getting pregnant, and she commented that she sees a common theme of their wanting someone who will love them, as well as a certain feeling of entitlement to having a baby. It really is a complex situation.

A couple of weeks ago, an expecting student said to me, "You're pregnant, right? Well, I have a question about those government check things you get when the baby's born." She was referring to the WIC (Women, Infants, Children) program that I only knew a little about because I had worked as a cashier at a grocery store all four years of high-school. It's a program that provides low-income mothers with vouchers for food items such as baby formula, cheese, eggs, bread, veggies, etc. I told her I probably wasn't the best person to ask because I didn't know very much about it all, and she acted completely shocked. She responded, "What do you mean? You get it, right? Everybody who has a baby gets it." When I told her that, no, I didn't get it, she asked, "You mean, you have to pay for Enfamil and stuff with your own money? Why?" I was stumped. I didn't really know what the right way to answer her was. I just told her that, luckily, my husband and I both have good jobs that make us enough money to support the baby on our own. "Oh, so you're too rich to be on it, huh? I bet you wish you got it, though, right? That stuff's expensive." Again, I said, "No." I told her that since we could afford to pay for the baby, and that since we had made the decision to have it and take care of it, we wanted to do it without government help.

I do think WIC is such a great and much needed program. I know there are lots of moms out there that probably wouldn't be able to make it without it. My conversation with this student, though, really made me so frustrated with the culture of poverty. And to preface my next statement, I really don't mean to generalize, because I know there are many many people in unideal financial situations, who struggle and work their butts off to turn things around for themselves and their families. It's just that I think there are many kids and teens who haven't been taught that government assistance programs shouldn't necessarily be used as a consistent source of income. How do we effectively give students in poverty equal opportunities and educate them in setting realistic goals for themselves? I know the answer involves some sort of intricate combination of education, individual motivation, and a decrease in society's glass ceilings and negative enablers, but why can't there just be a simple solution?

In my junior English class, we're reading Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and, along with that, discussing and studying the American dream. I had them read a New York Times article that poses the question: "Is the American dream that people can rise from rags to riches with a little grit and imagination - or fall from the top rungs to lesser positions if they can't cut it - mostly a myth?" (www.nytimes.com). Most of my students said they truly believe in the American dream, but contradictorily, numerous studies have shown that, despite the success stories on which we tend to base this dream, the vast majority of people won't climb from poverty to wealth or fall from wealth to the middle class. So to pose the seemingly ever present question, how do we make that dream come alive? How do we close the gap? Of course, education is a humongous part of the answer, but poverty still doesn't seem to be diminishing. And if we could close the gap, would money and excess truly make people happier? In the story of Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, says, "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired." In other words, these core problems are ubiquitous even among the wealthy. So what is the answer? How do we make life better for all people?

I know I just completely digressed from the topic of pregnancy, but I think those are the topics we really have to discuss to raise healthy babies who are loved and feel confident in their ability to make a positive contribution.