The waiting

I have two very pregnant friends who are currently under instructions to rest. Resting is one of those all-purpose types of advice that people like to give pregnant women and which pregnant women like to ignore (who, me? But I rested for a whole day before I gave birth to William! Don't I get credit for that?)

But it becomes a little more urgent when a doctor or midwife doles out the advice to rest. So right now, Natalie and Miller are resting. At least, they are supposed to be resting. I know them both, so that's why I wrote "supposd to be."

And they are waiting. Resting and waiting do not especially go well together, I found out when I was plodding through that last month of pregnancy. That's particularly true if you're a relatively high strung, Type A personality sort, as I was. I chafed at the advice to rest. I had stuff to do! I had laundry to do, carseats to get installed, things to organize. Who had time to rest? I didn't even allow myself much free time to rest because I resisted it so much. I worked at the newspaper down in Palm Springs right up until about two or three days before my water broke, much to the chagrin of my husband and family, who were utterly convinced I'd go into labor somewhere on a dusty desert road at night while driving home. But I was stubborn, convinced that I wouldn't go into labor until long after my due date. I was betting that I'd be at least a week overdue. I loaded up my puffy body in the Mazda each morning and tooled on down the hill to my job. I had plenty of time to rest, I told himself.

The day after I stopped working, I managed to prop myself up in bed with the laptop computer and a can of cherry limeade. That was my Official Day of Rest. I read, I surfed the 'Net, I watched some TV. Then the next day, I was busy busy busy, doing all sorts of things; running errands, getting the car seat installed, having dinner at the local terrible Chinese restaurant with some women from my officer spouses' group. But it was okay, I figured. I still had plenty of time.

But I had forgotten something important. I had forgotten the warning issued by my friend Phuong, who has one lovely child and is now expecting another. "Don't buy into the myth that the first child is always late," she intoned during one of our phone conversations.

Sure enough. My water broke the next morning, eight days before my due date. "What?" I said, a little outraged. "What about my time to rest? I was supposed to get time to rest! I'm supposed to be resting, not having a baby?" Ha ha. Not 24 hours later, I was holding William in my arms. I didn't get any rest after that for oh, what, six months?

That was perhaps the first big lesson I learned about being a parent. Perhaps you want things to be a certain way. Perhaps you plan and organize and expect things to be a certain way. And to some degree, you do have some control: the color of the nursery, whether you choose to use cloth or disposable diapers, if you are going to let your baby have a pacifier. But at some point, it doesn't matter how much you want things to go a certain way. You cannot, no matter how much you want to, control it all. There are certain things that will happen that are out of your control, infuriating as that may be.

However, that hard-won knowledge proved to be very useful to me as the little red baby unfurled his curled-up arms and legs, and like one of those speeded-up filmstrips of a daylily bursting into bloom, grew into William. He became a person, is a Person. He has opinions and preferences, and no matter how much I may want to change them, I cannot. Every day, he asserts more control over himself, over his environment, over his interactions with me and his father. Every day, he becomes even more of a person, more himself.

I once read newborn babies don't understand that they are separate entities from their mothers; they instinctively believe themselves to be extensions of their mothers. And for many months, I felt that way about William, as he surely felt that way about his relationship to me. He was not separate, he was not other. He was an extension of me, part of myself. On some deep level, he will always be that, but he is growing more independent. He sees himself now, I believe, as himself, not as part of me anymore. He is his own self.

And with that assertion of self comes challenges. I may want William to lie down meekly on his changing table so that I can wipe his bottom and put a clean diaper on him. He feels otherwise. And he makes it clear, very loudly and with great effort, that he would prefer to, say, wiggle around, bare-bottomed, until he can stand up and then slap his hands with great force against the Spider-Man sticker on the wall. And it doesn't matter how much I work to wrestle him back down to the table, he will expend just as much energy working against me because we don't want the same thing. Sometimes, I win. Sometimes, he wins. Mostly, I win, since I am bigger and I'll be darned if my toddler's going to run around without a diaper on. But sometimes he wins, and I don't bother putting the shorts or overalls back on over his diaper because frankly, I'm tired, and he really really really wants to talk to Spider-Man.

I am stubborn. My husband is stubborn. Our child is stubborn. We truly are three peas in a pod, aren't we? But we all have learned so much from each other. And we still are.

So, back to the whole resting and waiting thing. I could advise my friends to rest, but they both know how hilarious that would be coming from me. I have been trying to encourage them in their attempts at resting and cheerleading their success. But I have to admit that I'm doing a lousy job at waiting myself. I can't wait for good news!