Crazy Girl

So, scratch what I said about not barfing anymore. Still doing that, apparently.

The last few days have been interesting. My not-feeling-pregnant-anymore and worrying-baby-stuff stress came to the head the other night. I was just talking calmly to Kyle about how I was starting to feel overwhelmed with all of this stuff that I didn't know and how many options there are, etc., and all of the sudden the tears started flowing and I was freaking out. Hormones. Very fun.

Kyle doesn't know quite what to do with me in times like these. When we were first together, years ago (and hadn't really grown up yet), I had a habit of taking everything really personally and flipping out and crying and that didn't get us off to a super great start. I also just tend to be a highly emotional person, and when my emotions run high, often so do my tears. So recently I've had to tell him to ignore the tears and listen to what I'm saying, because otherwise it has a tendency to look to him like I am trying to be manipulative, when really crying is just my physical response to a high stress or high tension conversation. So he's been pretty good about just ignoring the tears and treating the conversation as he would without them.

This thing the other night, though, was different. I didn't start crying because our conversation was making me emotional, I started crying because I am a big crazy hormone filled ball of stress and honestly in this instance I needed him to see that I needed more than for him to just take what I was saying at face value and instead to calm me down and comfort me, but I have trained him too well to ignore my outbursts, so he asked me to turn off the light to he could go to sleep. And I continued sniffling in the dark for a good hour because I'm crazy, and, you know, PREGNANT.

I did manage to get across to him that I really need him to start thinking about things. It's really stressing me out that he's not worried about anything relating to this pregnancy or caring for a baby or witnessing another human being come barreling out of my nether regions. And it's because he doesn't have a freaking clue what he's getting himself into. Unlike, say, me, he hasn't spent a bazillion years reading the books and the blogs. He doesn't have a lot of friends with kids, and the ones that do he doesn't see or talk to very often. He has no idea that there's anything that he ought to worry about. I don't even care that he choose to worry about the same things that are stressing me out. In fact, it would probably be better if he chose his own topics so that he could calm me down about car seats and daycare, and I could help relieve his stress about say, the likelihood of me dying in childbirth .Because that's something I'm pretty not worried about. But at this point he's only really worried about money, but we're both always worried about money, baby or not, so that's not really different than it was before we got this party started.

He has vowed to begin doing some reading. I've given him Henci Goer's The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth, because the über-sciencey nature of it is right up his alley, and because even though he's been supportive of my desires to have a natural and low-intervention birth, I want him to be on the same page with me on the reasons WHY I want that, so he can better support me in getting what I (we) want and not calling for an epidural at the first sign of wife-in-pain, as one of our friends did for his natural birth craving wife. And He also has Penny Simkin's The Birth Partner, because, well, duh. That's all that I'm asking of him at this point. When he gets through those, we'll see if he's interested in anything else. At least we have a couple of 10+ hour plane rides coming up to work on all that reading.