21 - 23 wks

21 wks

Enter the second half of this pregnancy. I get to go to the hospital for the ultimate ultrasound. It feels like kind of a big occasion, so I bring my mom and my sister. Mom has never seen ultrasound images before; she stares at the screen and I’m not sure she actually knows which part of the baby is being shown. But she’s obviously fascinated anyway. We get a complete overview of the baby; the brains first, then the head and the heart, the spinal cord, kidneys, and finally the legs and…

Even though I’ve somehow known I’m having a boy for weeks now, and even though I can clearly see a third – somewhat smaller – ‘leg’ down there, I’m still not confident enough to declare this baby a boy myself. What if it turns out to be a girl after all and I’ve already established the opposite? Would that be my kid’s first prenatal trauma? It seems best to wait for the expert to say it out loud.

‘Well, you’ve probably already noticed…’ the ultrasound lady says. My mom, sister and me say nothing. ‘It’s a boy!’ I smile. It’s a boy. My sister leans over and whispers: ‘you’re having a son!’. My hormones take over and the tears in my eyes make the baby’s legs and genitals all blurry. By the time I ‘m back to normal, the screen is showing Junior’s head in 3D, a little skinny babyhead, eyes closed, but hand touching chin, like he is thinking hard about something. Rodin himself couldn’t have sculptured it any better. There’s a beautiful little baby boy in there.

22 wks

The fact that I’m having a boy means that I am not having a girl. Obvious, of course, but this is something that I somehow needed to process for about a day. Last week I was having a baby, but now I am having a boy. So within a week I lost the possibility of having a girl. That means no dresses, probably no doll houses, no earring decision for the first 10 years at least. Kind of sad. Okay. Bye bye imaginary girl.

Having a boy means picking out the coolest clothes, means broken arms or wrists when playing outside, might mean cars and footballs, knights and soldiers. Slight chance of earring decision in high school. Having a boy means I no longer have to look for names, because I’ve already got one. And it means I can start buying orange kid stuff, which seemed better for a boy than for a girl. I’m having a boy!

The pregnancy books say I will be feeling the baby more and more as the weeks progress. And they are right. He kicks in the mornings and the evenings mostly, or at least those are the times when I’m the most conscious of it. It’s kind of a funny feeling, and it often makes me smile. It makes up for my belly that has exploded over the weekend, thus eliminating some of the few final options of normal-Thessa-shirts I could still wear. It also makes up for being exhausted at the end of a working day. It doesn’t make up yet for the drastic surge in frequency of toilet visits, both day AND night.

23 wks

Annoyed by men staring at your breasts a little too openly? Try the entire population staring at your belly all the time. My entrance is no longer marked by me or my attitude as I walk in, but by my pregnant state of being. It took some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. I can now be proud or amused slightly more than being irritated or embarassed. The smile that appears on most people’s faces after establishing the presence of the belly makes up for a lot.

I can’t sleep normally any more. I keep waking up, either because I have to pee, or because I feel sick or because I can’t find a right posture to lie in. I try out different kinds of pillows in different places and finally settle on some kind of pillow-fortress in which I barricade myself. This means I am able to move as little as possible, which is nice. It also meant waking up in horror in the middle of the night, because I couldn’t find the way out of bed to go to the toilet. But the end result: sleep in nice little 2.5-hr-intervals, which is better than no sleep at all. I watch tv on my iPhone in between.

The club of women-who-have-been-there are including me in their midst more and more. I keep getting showered with the most compelling birth stories. The difference between now and 10 weeks ago is that now, I find myself interested. I want to know how all of them did it, experienced it. I want to be put at ease, and with every story I find a way there. You gave birth for more than 24 hours? Well, you’re still smiling AND my baby will probably be as much in a hurry as I was. You sometimes pee a little when jumping or dancing? Well, you have three babies and I’ll only have one or two. Your wife had to stay in bed for 12 weeks? Well, I’m Superwoman, so no worries. They wouldn’t give you the epidural? Well, I know one or two people in the hospital, and I’ve already programmed their data in my Phone.

In the end, everyone tells me, it all comes down to one thing and one thing alone: the moment where you finally get to meet the one that has been living inside you for so long, will make up for every contraction, every C-section, and any pair of stitches. Also, this road is a one-way kind of deal: there’s no turning back. I wouldn’t want to anyway; I’m way too curious already.