It'll Happen When It Happens
Am I in labor? An investigation.
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Babies are notoriously dogshit at respecting schedules, but this knowledge hasn't prevented me from quietly hoping against hope that my baby might be born on or before my due date. I'm "due" on Sunday.
One funny (not funny- ha ha, funny- lol fuck me) thing about pregnancy is that due dates aren't really any indicator of when something will happen, but more an indicator that something will probably happen in the days-- or perhaps weeks-- around that date. Only 50% of first-time mothers give birth on or before their "due date." The rest have to hang on like a watched pot, fielding questions about whether the baby has come yet. It's like waiting for the Clark Street bus in Chicago after midnight. "Estimated arrival times" may as well be randomly generated numbers.
My pregnant body is a Magic 8 Ball that can only answer "Ask again later," or "Reply hazy, try again."
A few people who I don't talk to on a daily basis have asked me if I'm a mother yet. I am not. Others have asked if I feel like I am "close." I have no fucking idea. The start of labor, like so many of pregnancy's mysteries, is a secret kept by the uterus, the biggest diva of all the organs. She will show up to your wedding after not RSVP'ing, but she will lead the conga line, give the best toast, and then disappear with your college friends for several minutes and return to the reception obviously tripping on mushrooms. I hate her, but at least she makes the party interesting.
Before I give birth, something is supposed to happen that is called "labor." I've been trying to figure out what that is and how it feels for quite some time, and frankly, I'm at a bit of a loss.
What is labor and how do I know if I am in it? The further I dig, the murkier the answer. There's a simple medical definition-- "a series of progressive, accelerating contractions of the uterus with the purpose of expelling a fetus through the birth canal." But that answer is complicated by the fact that I've never been in labor before, and there doesn't seem to be a consensus description of how a person might know for sure when it's happening to them.
In the movies and on TV, it's something involving "water breaking" and "contractions" and doubling over in pain and, eventually, a furious woman screaming "YOU DID THIS" from a hospital bed at her hapless husband (played by Adam Driver, in a role that earns him a surprise Oscar nomination) for comedic effect. Problem is that it rarely happens like that. One woman I know says when her water broke, she thought she had spontaneously peed a little in her pants. Some women's water doesn't even break on its own; the doctor has to do it when she's already at the hospital. Plus, historically, movies and TV are a bad barometer for women's lived experiences.
The internet is, shockingly, not helpful either. Part of this is because our language is an inadequate way to describe specific types of pain. Pregnancy apps that I can't wait to uninstall from my phone compare labor to a feeling similar to menstrual cramps, pain that "wraps around" from the lower back to the front of the body, a "tightening" of the abdominal area. But I've been pregnant for what feels like 87 years, and all of those things have been happening off and on for the duration of my pregnancy, getting more intense the further along I am. Nothing in my entire pelvic region feels normal. My abdomen is already tight; it is several times larger than it normally is, because it contains an entire 6-8 lb human baby, a couple liters of amniotic fluid, a placenta, and probably a big lamp with fringes on the shades, like Mary Poppins' magical carpetbag.
I've been having some out-of-the-ordinary physical sensations that could possibly be laborlike, and I asked my doctor what that was about.
"Oh," she said in her light German accent, "Prodromal labor. With a first baby, that can go on for weeks."
Looking for a silver lining of certainty, I replied, "But could it mean that I'm close to giving birth?"
"It could."
"But not necessarily."
"No, not necessarily."
Some friends and well-meaning acquaintances have assured me "trust me, you'll know" when labor is happening. Others have said the opposite-- they had no idea until they went to the hospital and found that they were so close to giving birth that the anesthesiologist didn't even have time to get there with an epidural before a baby had come out of them. These disparate anecdotes make all of the anecdotes essentially useless; there are no rules if there are so many exceptions. I'm discovering that when a person who has kids uses the pronoun "you" to describe a pregnancy-related experience, it often means "I," and "I" doesn't bring me any closer to knowing what is going to happen to "me."
Anything that happens during very late pregnancy could be world-alteringly significant, or it could mean nothing. It's like an episode of Twin Peaks.
Am I in labor? Hell if I know. Is the baby close to arriving? Who can say? For now, the only guidance I feel I can rely on is frustratingly vague:
It'll happen when it happens.
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