Having spent recent months being very quiet about it, other than to close friends and family of course, but more recently not being able to avoid the hugeness of my nine-month pregnant belly, I now find myself on the eve of my "due date", wishing that I had a due "fortnight". For, now that this spurious and somewhat arbitrary date is upon us, I understand why many women get fed up and frustrated! I realise that I have been fortunate to have carried our Mossling very well, and that in the scheme of things I have had a straightforward pregnancy. Many women have all sorts of discomfort, aches, pains, niggles and traumas, which make the coming and going of the due date all the more irritating!
It's an interesting statistic that only 5% - yes, that's right, 5% - of babies are actually born on their given date and that the majority (certainly for first-timers) are born "late". There are a lot of reasons why this might be, not least the question mark over the original date from which doctors and midwives work, which is from the first day of the last period. There is also only so much that can be taken from the measurements at routine scans, as there is always the element of human and machine error, coupled with a not very co-operative foetus which has wriggled out of the way. However, be that as it may, there are surely other factors at play.
My wonderful husband and I (we got married in December) have the blessing and good fortune to be under the care of the amazing Liz Nightingale, an independent midwife with many years' experience and a head for information and good sense that is second to none. One of the things she has mentioned is that if the mother has a cold, for example, the body pauses baby-growing and focusses on Mummy-healing for a while. This seems perfectly sensible to me! There is also the question of whether everything is coming together at the right time for a mother to go into labour spontaneously (that is, without any intervention such as a stretch and sweep or being induced).
Anyway, our little bundle is "due" tomorrow and we are very relaxed about the whole thing. I've had a word with the child, and said it's OK to come out now, but not until after I've had cake with Pilates friends and colleagues tomorrow afternoon...the weekend or the early part of next week will be fine. I have an acupuncture session on Tuesday with a fabulous lady called Carys Morgan, whom I met earlier this week for some energy-boosting needling, and we may go for a little Chinese "nudge" in the right direction if Junior hasn't shown up by then. Had we been under the care of the NHS midwifery service, we would probably be offered a sweep and an induction at 40 weeks and bulldozed into messing around with what is for the majority of pregnancies, a completely normal and risk-free process. I won't be eating copious amounts of pineapple or slathering myself in Clary Sage oil either, nor will spicy curry or castor oil be on the menu (it gets messy, apparently)!!
There is so much that I want to write about the pregnancy, birth and midwifery/NHS experiences we have had, and what we have witnessed other people go through...suffice it to say that I might never get around to it, but I will certainly try! One rant will be to bemoan the probable demise of independent midwifery practice in the United Kingdom and Europe as of next October...a true tragedy for those midwives who wish to support mothers in a different way and practice in a much more natural and non-invasive manner, and a shame for women who choose another path, making way at the same time for those mothers who don't have the freedom of choice in the standard, fear-driven and protocol-led system currently available, as well as taking the strain off the NHS. As things stand, we are having a home birth, with minimum intervention, and I have had the best care (and continuity) I could possibly have wished for.
Bring it on, baby!!!
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