Fear is like a heartbeat in the dark. It’s always there, but sometimes you feel it more than others. Usually you can’t hear it. But once in a while, in the pause, there it is again, quietly reminding you. My natural level of anxiety doesn’t help. I’ll admit, some nights I forget to take my anti-depressant. It doesn’t send me into a huge meltdown the next day or anything, but I can definitely tell that I’m a little bit more jumpy than usual, a little bit more anxious.

I’ve started getting – or started feeling – Braxton-Hicks contractions. I don’t recall getting them so early with Devin, but then this is my second pregnancy. But it still startled me the first time I felt one, last week. I knew immediately what I was feeling, that tightening in my belly, and my hands flew down to confirm that my uterus was indeed hard. I waited for it to go away before letting out a breath. No more happened that night, so I’ve come to expect the one contraction a day – usually in the evening, when I’m relaxing. It’s just my body doing its job.

But then the last two days I’ve noticed hard spots. It confuses me, because BH contractions are the full belly, all over. So it puzzles me when I feel a hard, very firm area, but the other side is soft and giving. Just now it happened again, and I’m starting to think what I’m feeling is a butt or a head, pressing outwards. I always forget how big she must be. I keep thinking she is still small, but the way she moves and the space she fills belies that.

As active as this baby is, there are still plenty of days when her movements are quieter and spaced further apart. Usually I can tell when it’s going to be one of those days when the kicks I feel are down low, meaning she’s probably facing down instead of out. Today was one of those days. All kicks I felt were down low and to the left, and sometimes I wouldn’t feel kicks at all, just pressure against my cervix (ouch – thankfully that didn’t happen for very long). But I also realize that I am very lucky to feel as much as I do, especially this early with the placenta where it is. I’m still puzzled by it, to be honest…. but very thankful!

Sometimes people say to me, “You need to just not worry. You need to just enjoy this.” And I look at them a bit puzzled. What choice do I have in the matter? I am either worried or I am not, and sometimes it feels like I am just along for the ride, enjoying the good days and riding out the bad. But I am always fully present, and how many others can say that? As much as I want this time to fly by, to just get me to the end with a live baby in the hospital, I cannot willfully ignore what I have right now. As much as I am attuned to every little pain and lack of movement, so too am I attuned to every little wiggle and poke that she gives me. I notice all the little things that too often slide under the radar of a busy working woman. Yes, my life does in many ways revolve around this pregnancy. Yes, I do sit in my chair with my hands on my belly, lost inside my head, inside my body, feeling and appreciating her. When I bend over and say, “Ooch, she kicked my cervix!” they probably assume it is with irritation, but in reality it is gleeful, revelling in the discomfort and the sheer fact that it happens at all.