The wonders of pregnancy are many.
As a student of literature and someone highly inquisitive I have read and read and read about all of the many forms that pregnancy may take, from morning sickness and swollen feet to exhaustion and cesarean sections. I have also researched motherhood and infancy, what is best for baby and what is best for the family dynamic. Along with my gut feelings about all of these things and how to respond to them, I feel I have a good grasp on how to handle this new journey in my life.
And then there are things no one tells you about: I can't wash my feet. That's right. I am so short, with such a short torso, and my belly has gotten so huge that I have to cursorily wave the sponge in the direction of my feet and hope I did a good job. I can't stir pots on the back burner of my stove. I can't scratch the back of my thigh. Silly little things that no one ever mentions in the billions of blogs, articles, and books about pregnancy and motherhood.
Finally, there is the big one:
Obsession.
I think this is a form of the mood swings that are often lamented, but for some reason my mood swings, especially late in my pregnancy, have manifested into serious obsessions. It has taken me until this week to realize that's what has been happening to me. It is the reason I have gone months without blogging. I was afraid I would rant and rave about whatever my current obsession was and then wish for weeks or months that I had never written in the first place.
It all began a few months back when I began looking into the impact of full time daycare on infants. I always knew I wanted to be a stay at home mom, but I was interested in the phenomenon of more and more women racing back to work shortly after delivering babies. What was the long term psychological effect on those newborns? On the mom? On the dad? On the family as a whole? I went crazy!
It was all I could talk about. Now, don't mistake me; I still feel the same way I have all along, but I was out of control in my obsession to change the world, write a book, give public speeches. From there I became obsessed with natural childbirth, with breast feeding, with the Republican party's idiot presidential candidates.
Day after day I would be hyper-focused on whatever my current topic of interest was and my poor husband would have to converse with me ad nauseam about it when he got home from work.
We have not had the often touted screaming, yelling, crying fights. I haven't been extremely emotional and weepy or highly irrational about small non-issues (although I do cry much much easier now than I did before). But I realize that this months long bout of obsessive behavior is in fact my form of mood swings.
Today, as I was out for my morning walk in my neighborhood, my head cleared for the first time and I realized that while I still feel super strongly about all of the issues I have obsessed over, read about, researched, discussed with Carlos and friends and family, I no longer feel overwhelmed with passionate emotion about the decisions that other people make that run counter to my own beliefs.
Basically, I am having a moment of normalcy. Sanity.
But I just had to hurry up and blog about it because this moment may vanish as suddenly as it appeared.
