Continued Questioning

Perhaps due to the fact the in 2001 49% of all labors in the U.S. were medically induced, the Western world seems to have forgotten that babies don't know how to follow a calendar. Or, if somehow the little ones do know how, the majority choose not to. The most incomprehensible question I have been asked recently is, "So when is the baby coming?" The reason it causes confusion for me is that the vast majority of the askers seem to believe that I will be able to just give them a date. (Oh, she'll be here by 4:35 Wednesday afternoon. . .) In fact, often the line of questioning goes as follows: "So, when are you due again? Oh. But when is the baby actually going to come?" Such questions would be completely understandable were there a hint of levity in the second question, but such hints are extremely rare. It really doesn't make sense to me in the least.

It's also interesting to me that several people have asked if we have an appointment to be induced yet. We haven't even gotten to our due date yet for heaven's sake! I think it's too bad that so many people think getting on medication is the best way to do this. I don't think very many Dr.'s talk about how going on Pitocin makes contractions that are harder to deal with than normal contractions (for baby and mommy, and thus for daddy too :), and increases the risk of having to have an emergency C-section. Plus once you're hooked up to Pitocin, you have to get hooked up to a bunch of other things, even if you still choose not to have the epidural. Maybe I'm the only one for whom that's a major deciding factor "Will I have to be hooked up to a bunch of junk and have to depend on the nurses to do anything and they might forget about me anyway?" That could be because once the nurses did forget about me and I was hooked up to a bunch of stuff, and although I was perfectly healthy I couldn't do anything, and that made me mad. (Thank goodness we changed hospitals!) Anyway, I'm not planning on letting anybody induce me unless it's due to an actual medical concern, and I'm especially not planning on planning for it before we even give the poor girl a chance to come on her own.

The last of my favorite questions is this one: "Are you in labor yet?" aka "Do you have a baby yet?" I know this one comes from the best of intentions. Pure curiosity is not a bad thing, and concern for how I'm doing is certainly nice to see. The only problem is this question's frequency, which is unknown to individual askers. They only asked once or twice in the last week, how are they supposed to know that they were the 14th one today? The frequency is only a problem because I start to think, "If everybody else is impatient for me to have this baby, I probably should be too by now." Those kinds of thoughts just make it more likely that I end up in a hospital bed hooked up to a bunch of unnecessary stuff waiting for the nurses who have forgotten me, and if that happens, Kevin is certainly going to have an ornery wife on his hands. Poor Kevin.

Somehow word spread that I was already 3 weeks overdue. The sympathy started rolling my way like a tidal wave. Goodness, I'm certainly glad I'm not 3 weeks overdue. I'm not sure I can take three more weeks of these questions!