Oh boy - #133

Time for the shift.

Well in advance of giving birth, I began preparing for it: the hospital bag by the door, the birth plans printed and stashed in folders in each car, the cloth diapers pre-washed like the little rural-living hippies we are, and of course, writing this hiatus newsletter from Shangrilogs. 

Preparation is something I am good at, and last Saturday night I settled into bed, fully prepared for the two-hour span it was often taking me to fall asleep. I had my distractions, my water, my Tums, and as good of an attitude about it as I could. But around midnight, I started to get irritated. This was veering into three hours of just laying there awake, itching all over my body and heartburn crawling up my throat.

I slathered on hydrocortisone cream, I took Tums, and I opened my old nemesis Candy Crush. I slathered on more cream, I took more Tums. I paced around the living room, I drank water. More cream, more Tums. More pacing, more water. So much more Candy Crush. Until somewhere around 2am, the pain of the heartburn became unbearable enough to beg the question: is this still heartburn?

I looked at Ben, peacefully sleeping. Everyone was peacefully sleeping, even the kittens, as I replaced pacing with panting, bent over my pillow unsure how to get any relief from the pain gripping my chest. By 2:30, I had to wake him up. We debated symptoms before calling the hospital.

What do you think the hospital said when I told them I was having gripping and unrelenting chest pain?

So we grabbed our go-bags for labor (just in case), Ben took Jibs for a brief walk, I texted our neighbors at the reasonable hour of 3am to ask them to tend to Jibs in the morning, and we went outside on May 12 into a blizzard. The car was iced over, and while Ben chipped away at the windshield, I noticed the pain had descended from my chest into my abdomen. I took out my phone, opened the Notes app, and started a new note: Contractions.

We headed down the dirt road, and I kept an eye on the clock. I was waiting to tell Ben I was having contractions until I could be sure they were actually contractions. As we rounded the final corner of our road before the highway, we saw two eyes gleaming at us. The first bear of the season stood in the middle of the road, the snow swirling around him, before he jogged off into the trees.

“I’m having contractions.”

“We could name him Bear.”

This was fun.

The 1.5 hour drive was slow, visibility was very bad, I was very, very thirsty, and the contractions were five minutes apart, one minute long. Because we live so far from the hospital, this is when we were told to head in: one minute long, five minutes apart. The chest pain had dissipated and my attention was going toward relaxing into the abdominal pain.

Whiteout conditions turned to rain an hour into the drive, and with my attention relaxed, I faced a new problem: I was fucking starving. We’d eaten dinner at 5:30pm to try to ward off any heartburn, and it was nearing 12 hours since I’d eaten. At least the reason we’d chosen this hospital was the food. I could eat when we got there.

Except when we got there, we found out the hospital restaurant is closed on Sundays and were told my husband could DoorDash us some food except everything we Googled was closed because it was Mother’s Day.

We checked into the maternity floor and a woman with the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen fisted me to check my cervix while she repeatedly said sorry and I repeatedly gasped it’s fine. The cervix was closed, like every single restaurant. I wasn’t going into labor.

I had experienced what is called prodromal labor, a type of false labor where your contractions present as regular in timing, but just never get any worse. They had faded away by 7am, and we left the hospital bleary-eyed, worn out, and with new instructions for next time: “if you’re having contractions, just get in the bath and see if they go away. You might have contractions like these for weeks.”

Contractions “like these” mean my body is getting ready for birth. She’s practicing, if you will. Turns out she had her own to-do list. And so we reviewed our middle of the night blizzard bear spotting experience as a trial run.

• The hospital bags were properly packed. We had everything we needed, except pillows. Everyone said bring pillows and blankets, and we were like “won’t they have that?” and it doesn’t matter that they have it. It’s a small regional hospital and you should assume their pillows and blankets are the same you would find at the Travel Inn across the street. Bring the pillows and blankets.

• Don’t give birth on a Sunday because there isn’t any food????

• Pack food.

• Pack more food than that.

• Have your birth plan in hand before a night nurse with falsies goes wrist-deep on you.

But other than that, we were ready. We’re as ready as two people can be. All there is to do now is wait for him to be ready, too.

We are some 10ish days before my due date. I thought, heading toward this newsletter, that maybe I’d write a letter from my non-mom self to this coming version of me. Maybe I’d conjure an essay about the parents who’ve inspired me. Maybe I’d write about the way the native fauna parent their own offspring. Those all seemed reasonable. What was I going to be doing but sitting around and thinking anyway?

Well, turns out, going to the hospital, and then spending a week finding ways to be even more ready, like stocking the pantry, filling the freezer, and finishing up various other chores because babies really can come whenever they want.

This is edition 133 of this newsletter. Shangrilogs is read in all 50 US states and across 119 countries. There are over 6000 subscribers, and some 370 of them are paid. My goal with this newsletter was always 10,000 subscribers (aside from rogue delusions about skyrocketing fame) because 10,000 is a nice round number. But 6000 people is almost as many live in my entire county! It’s certainly more than live in my town, despite the population preparing to add one more. (Two if you count Jibs, which I obviously do.) 

I’m proud of this writing, and I treat it like a job. I show up week after week for both the free edition and the paid, and because of that, I’m taking a break — just like I would at a “real” job.

I’m now officially on parental leave from this newsletter, with intentions of taking 3-ish months off. 

I was an advocate of paid leave long before I ever considered having children, so I’m sticking by that, and I’m hoping you’ll do the same.

That said, finances change for people, and if you’d like to pause your paid membership while I’m out, you can do so here. I’m not looking. 

This is quite the community of nature-lovers, small town folk, curmudgeonly loners trying to escape to the woods, adventure athletes, and lurkers. I’m so grateful for you. I’m so grateful that people read what I write. I’m so grateful that it pays a couple of the bills. And indeed I am more saccharine about this newsletter than I ever was about pregnancy.

I’ll let you know when I’m safely out the other side, and you can always see how the pets are fairing on Instagram.

See you in the fall, and thanks for everything.

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New to the range? Here are some of the most read pieces:

Making friends

#20: Desperation only works when it works both ways
#76: Where no one knows your name
#97: How long does it take to make a friend?

The cabin, the valley

#31: But does it have character?
#47: So you want to live in a cabin
#57: A tour of the valley
#80: An oxygen altar
#96: One night in the woods

Making a human

#65: The pulsing drive of fear
#110: Can I still go skiing?
#119: How I hope to parent
#121: Who gets to know you’re pregnant?

About this human

#40: The guns were under the bed
#60: Have you lost your mind?
#54-55: Becoming a writer, Part 1 and Part 2

For a laugh

#87: Someone’s best one night stand
#95: How to never see a bear

And you can see the whole archive here. And as said before, there’s always Instagram where I post an ungodly amount of stories about the animals: Finn, Banzet, Link, and Jibs. My first and always babies.