Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life!

It is 9:50 pm the evening before I go in to the hospital to have my first child.  Whoa.

I was obsessed, the entire pregnancy, with experiencing birth the most natural possible way.  It feels like some sort of womanly rite of passage and I was determined to reject the pain meds and go hardcore.  I wanted to have a water birth and was not deterred by the, let's be honest, fairly disgusting idea of sitting in a pool of my blood and amniotic fluid and placenta.  Delightful.  I convinced myself anything less than a natural birth sans medical intervention would irreversibly harm my darling baby and rob her of the healthiest possible circumstances.  Aaaaaaaaaaand then in the 35th week, she was breech.  First time in the whole pregnancy, but there she was!  Head up in my rib cage and tiny bum sitting in my pelvis.  Desperate, I tried EVERYTHING to make her turn.  I had acupuncture several times in my small toe and up my legs (there are places which are supposed to open up your womb more and encourage the baby to move a lot.  Often babies will turn after a good solid acupuncture session with needles shoved into your pinky toes.  It's unpleasant, but what you gonna do, right?)  One time my sort of incompetent midwife actually tread upon the needle in my left pinky toe, ripping it unceremoniously out of its cozy nook in my nerve endings and causing me to bleed all over the floor.  By the way she LAUGHED when this happened and said, "Wow!  That has never even happened to me before!"

I wanted to say, "It didn't happen to you. You did it to ME."  Which, of course the American in me would never allow me to say.  Instead, I tried to act like it was nothing and said something like, "Don't even worry about it.  Not a big deal at all.  I didn't need all the blood.  Seriously, no worries!"  Through a toothy, forced grin.  So weird sometimes when cultures intersect.  Anyway...

I put a big wooden plank on the couch and laid upon it with all the blood rushing to my head.  I did "forward inversions" kneeling on the couch with my elbows on the ground.  I crawled in a similar position across the floor.  I saw a chiropractor.  I stopped eating anything sweet at all.  Aaaaaaaaaand she is still head up.  So last week when I went to the hospital to check, they said she was borderline too big to try to deliver naturally from the breech position.  I cried.  I was so disappointed in myself.  Also, it was terrifying because an event to which I had looked forward for ages which was starting to feel like would never happen was suddenly called, "Tuesday".  As in, like five days from then.  They said the safest thing to do is have a C-section.  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I got it in my head at some point that to have a C-section was to sell out.  That in general you should have a healthy distrust of the medical professionals who force you to have them when you don't need them.  That God made the body perfectly able to deliver babies normally and if you have enough faith you could deliver a huge breech baby with no problems.  But you know something?  The people who told me all that stuff aren't looking into the earnest face of the obviously concerned doctor who has experience and A MEDICAL DEGREE  who is telling me, "I really recommend you have a C-section for the safety of your child.  It is risky to try it vaginally and if, mid-delivery there is a problem...we can't suddenly alter course.  Where mid-vaginal delivery we would already long have opted for emergency C-section, such is impossible by breech babies."  Also, the well-meaning people who told me it would be fine don't love my baby like I do.  Point: I came to terms.

It didn't hurt that while I sat on the baby heart-moniter for 90 minutes a couple of days later, I heard the screaming and sobbing of a woman in obviously horrendous pain down the hallway.  That essentially pain-free C-section looked better for every horrifying groan :/

Aaaaaaaand so tomorrow morning I will go to the hospital bright and early and have my baby pushed out of me.  I do feel guilty for skipping the rite of passage, but obviously the single most important thing is the health of the squiggly creature I've been growing for 9 months.  Man, I love her.  I can't believe how much!  We've never even met, but she is the most important thing I've ever helped create.

It has been such an emotional journey.  When I look back on the planning stages and remember how concerned I was that I might have to cancel and engagement or risk losing the respect of the people I work for, I can almost laugh!  If there is nothing else I learn in life, I hope I someday learn that it's about carving my own path through the world and not worrying so much about the comments from the periphery.  Autonomy.  It is the greatest thing a person can have in my opinion.  Figuring out what it means to be who you are in all the contexts.  Without too much influence from people who ultimately have very little idea where you are coming from.

I hope I can teach my daughter that.  I yearn to provide her with a platform for healthy self-expression.  I want to validate the heck out of her!  Encourage her every enthusiasm (provided it doesn't endanger her life) as she learns all about the world!  I want to teach her that her body is an amazing gift and blessing and that it came exactly the way it was supposed to!  I want to teach her to go boldly into the world with reckless love and warmth.  I want to teach her to breathe freely and to be whoever she is.  I can't wait to find out :)

Weeping in Paris

Last week I went to Paris for the first time.  The trip was about singing for an important conductor of my repertoire specifically regarding a production of Cosi fan tutte in London in a couple of seasons.  It was suuuuuuuch an awesome trip and I noticed my wallet growing thinner in direct proportion to my thickening stomach! :)  The food.  Holy canoli.  THE FOOD.  If for no other reason, go to Paris to eat.  But, of course, there are millions of reasons to go to Paris!  Notre Dame!  The Louvre!  Musee D'Orsay!  Just the general walking around in it!  Glorious.  And thrilling!  Mostly good thrills, but also crazy-go-nuts ones like driving our car all the way into downtown. WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!  It was fine, but it was also full of the most heinous traffic violations to which I have ever been witness.  I kept thinking about my tiny hometown of West Richland, WA and how two cars constitute "traffic".  Ah, simpler times.  It was seriously an amazingly romantic and incredible trip.  I wished over and over that I could go back in time and tell my disaffected teen-aged self that in a few years time I'd be in Paris celebrating my birthday with the most wonderful man I've ever met, completely in love and expecting our first darling baby.  I never knew how many fabulous things life had in store.  I always worried about bad stuff, but it didn't occur to me to realistically dream about the kind of stuff that happens now.  I mean, I always wished for the awesome to occur, but I didn't imagine it actually would!  It did.  I was in Pareeeeee!

A kind of hilarious/awkward thing happened one night we were there which I hesitate to share lest the participants find this blog and resent me for publishing, but on the other hand...so great :)  We went to a kinda schmanzy, spendy restaurant one night which was highly rated on Yelp.  I had to make a reservation and everything and apparently three days in advance our only opportunity to get one was if someone cancelled.  Luckily, someone did and we got to go.  We ended up arriving a few minutes late and were seated next to a couple of white-haired German gentlemen, who began engaging us in conversation.  They advised us what to order (There was this halibut starter with lightly steamed baby vegetables which was so perfect I can't even tell you! I think it was the most balanced dish I've ever had. Too legit to quit.) and made generally awkward jokes about my being obviously pregnant. At one point one of them said, "Is the baby yours?" to me.  Um, yes.  The baby is mine.  I realized later that he meant is the baby Rasmus', which is an awkward question to ask a near perfect stranger, but not suuuuuper surprising coming from a German (if I'm being perfectly honest).  We affirmed that it was in fact our first child.  And that we've been married nearly 6 years.  Rasmus mentioned that I am a singer and when they found out about my repertoire they began to beg me to sing Elsas Traum from Lohengrin. Look, I don't want to be a diva or anything, but it is entirely embarrassing, in the middle of a restaurant where people are eating and conversing, to force the majority to hear something they didn't ask for.  I just don't like being made to feel that I have to prove something.  I long for those days to be behind me.  I know opera doesn't have the mass enthusiasm of, say, pop music, but in my sphere, I consider myself sufficiently proven.  Anyway, I declined.  So they insisted.  I declined again, as politely as I could.  Until they were begging for "three words only!"  And so, I caved and sang the first five words of the aria:
"Einsam in trueben Tagen..."

When people stopped eating and listened, I sort of chickened out and stopped.  If I had known the reaction I would have kept going, but I am a coward and like I said, I don't feel like putting myself in a position where I have to be impressive to people who aren't asking.  Anyway, shocking reaction.  People kind of applauded awkwardly, but the really weird thing is one of the German guys started SOBBING.  Like, truly sobbing.  Tears streaming down his face he said:
"What we've just had was a perfect moment."

Which, of course, made me feel entirely guilty.  I apologized for making him cry or for not singing more or whatever it was and he was inconsolable.  Good thing by then we were nearly finished and could soon leave!  Poor guy.  I am grateful, obviously, that he appreciated it, and now I just have to hope he comes to hear me sing sometime for real and then I won't feel like I owe him the rest of an aria!  :)