Taking Leave

My maternity leave officially starts today, and I can
barely put into words what a relief it is.
New York can be such a go-go-go place that
you forget to listen to what your body is saying to you.

I got a real wake up call last weekend by tripping and falling
on some uneven sidewalk.  We spent a night getting monitored
in the hospital, everything with baby and I checked out OK, and
we got discharged at 4am. Thankfully the fall happened
about 50ft from our house, and the husband was not far away
so he was able to get home quickly.  We called our midwife
and doula and were told to go get checked out, just to be sure
nothing was wrong.

If you are reading this and wondering why you didn't hear about it
sooner it's because I wasn't really telling anyone.  It felt like
kind of a weird topic to call people with "hey, I fell but we're fine.",
but I'll share it here and get it out there so I don't really have to
talk about it again. The whole event makes me feel pretty uncomfortable
when I think about it, but it's woven into our birth story now,
so there it will stay.  Someday we'll laugh at it, but I'm not ready
to do that just yet.

I took away some important things from the ordeal, and though
I wish I couldhave just realized these things naturally,
sometimes you really need to be hit with them for it
to all finally sink in.

1.) It was time to slow down. Not time to be trying to balance
work with pregnancy brain and dealing with a frigid commute
everyday-hoping that someone (anyone) will actually give you
a seat on the subway.

2.) Accepting that I am so not prepared/centered
for the birth process. At the hospital there were procedures that
were very painful, which also led to bad contractions- granted
this was already a stressful situation where I didn't really want
the outcome to be the birth of our baby. So that does change things
-but I realized for the first time what kind of pains I might feel
in labor and really became aware of how much I needed to focus
on relaxing my body and remaining calm. I know that I will be
in a totally different mindset when I'm actually in labor,
but it was still beneficial to have gone through this experience-
if only to learn that I need to keep meditating and practicing
my relaxation techniques.

It all leads back to self care.  From now until the baby is born
I will be resting a lot, eating good foods, drinking lots of
raspberry leaf tea, meditating, going for small walks, and
watching a lot of Poirot mysteries.
Visitors are totally welcome.