flux and trust

It's 4am. 4:06am technically, but I've been up since 3:35 or so. Waking up at this hour is utterly unsurprising. In God's grand design, I've become accustomed to waking every 2-2.5 hours in the middle of the night, with increasing frequency over the past 10 months. So at this point, the girl who formerly slept 8-9 uninterrupted hours upon penalty of extreme crankiness has become entirely functional at short intervals. I have to imagine this is by design. But normally, I can go back to sleep after a trip to the bathroom or an effortful roll over. Not tonight. This is, after all, quite possibly my last normal night. Tomorrow at 3:30p my ob will do a procedure called cervical ripening, designed to get my body to start dilating on it's own. Then at 6am on Thursday (or approximately 26 hours from now) I'll head into the hospital for induction. One would hope I would relish this last little bit of sleep. But rather, I'm up in the wee hours of the morning thinking about everything that's about to change.

In 26 hours nothing will ever be the same. Granted, that's been true for a while. From the moment I saw the word "pregnant" on a plastic stick (in a bathroom at a beach house roughly 40 weeks ago) I've known everything was going to change. Operative words "going to." And in many ways they already have. Who would have guessed on that humid summer day that I would learn (or actually care) about things like breastfeeding, cord care and tummy time? Or that Doug and I would trade in our vacation fund (bye bye Costa Rica 08) for nursery furniture? Or that I would find a bugaboo stroller the single most exciting thing since my Monique Lhuillier wedding dress? Yes, my friends - change is not upon us. Change has already come. 

But I ain't seen nothing yet. It's an interesting season. I haven't spent that much time anticipating or trying to really envisage what life would be like, as I've been keenly aware that it's an impossible task. I think I'm used to little uninterrupted sleep? I ain't seen nothing yet. I think I've become accustomed to misplacing my car keys (my laptop cord, my ever-loving mind)? Child's play for what's to come. Yet here I am at 4am - on the precipice of the earth's plates shifting and I find myself wondering what life will look like a few short hours from now. So much for my last restful night of sleep.

I've been told that I'll adore Avery more than I could possibly anticipate. That I will understand new depths of love and understand new dimensions of myself. What will that look like? I've been told my relationship with Doug (for good and for ill) will never be the same. Will he be able to see me as a sexual being after an experience like childbirth? Will I bite his head off repeatedly over the next six weeks over things like taking out trash pails that smell like diapers? The things I've been meaning to do for the past year, but haven't gotten to (like having our shower curtain monogrammed) - is there a snowball's chance in hell those things will EVER happen now?

My questions range from petty to profound, yet they are all perplexing and intriguing nonetheless. I guess I rambling at this point. Just wanted to share all that's swirling in my head.