As Real As It Gets

Yesterday, I stepped into reality.  I thought that I had already been realistic about our situation, but I wasn’t.  I had been caught up with pregnancy symptoms, the excitement of finally being pregnant, and the fear of losing the remaining baby.  Somehow those distractions kept the situation from really sinking in before.  But yesterday put an end to that.

At yesterday’s ultrasound – our 8 week and 1 day ultrasound – I saw our little peanut, only it doesn’t look like a peanut.  It has a distinct head and body.  There’s a dark spot in the skull that is the forming brain.   It has arm buds and leg buds and it was wiggling them during the ultrasound.  It is clearly a person…a two centimeter long person…but a person nonetheless.  And it has its own little 178 beats per minute heartbeat.  The Prince quipped, during the ultrasound, that Little Hamish must be a sprinter.   Cute...but I’m not comfortable calling the baby “Little Hamish,” anymore.  I can’t exactly explain why, but I think it is because the baby is no longer theoretical to me and that joke was okay when the baby wasn’t so real.  Now I am fully aware that there is an actual other human being growing inside of me and it is going to have its own identity and thought and needs.   And I’m freaking out a little bit.  Okay…I’m freaking out a lot.  I’m freaking out enough to need a new name for the baby.

Reading this, you may be thinking that I am crazy for not “knowing” this until week 8.  Don’t get me wrong.  I knew that there was a baby growing in my belly before yesterday’s ultrasound and I knew that it would continue to grow and develop.  But I didn’t become fully aware of the situation until yesterday.  Maybe I had been too blissful to think of the pregnancy in anything other than sugar-coated fluffiness.  Or, maybe I hadn’t allowed reality to sink in because I was stuck in my infertility mindset of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Maybe I was just so in love with the idea of my baby, I didn’t want to make it “real” because real things can go away.  I don’t know why reality is hitting now, but it is an amazing and scary thing.  I have never felt so connected.  I have never felt so much responsibility.   I have never felt so much fear that my body is going to fail me.  It’s failed me so many times in the past, when I was trying to get to this place in my journey.  If it fails me again, with so much at stake, I don’t know if I will ever get over the betrayal.  But for now I will try to push those fears away and learn how to reconcile reality and “over the moon” love, because that is where I want to dwell for the rest of this pregnancy.