Touring

We went on our hospital tour last night, and suddenly, everything kind of clicked. It all started when we walked into the lobby of Lions Gate and Toby stage-whispered, “Sweetie! We’re in the wrong place – this is a support group for husbands with fat wives!” It only got better from there with the jokes (culminating with his new game called “Is that her husband or her father?”), and not even my usual DeathGlare was enough to silence him this time. About fifteen couples sat around a big conference table and were told about the minutiae of what will happen during labour: from where to park to what type of juice there is to the channels available on the TV. After, we walked around the Labour and Delivery unit, followed by a tour of the maternity ward. I touched the bed, the couch where the “primary support person” sleeps, looked into the bathroom and the shower, smiled at the nurses.

And oh my god, the whole thing just scared the hell out of me. My eyes kept getting all teary with nerves and it’s like everything just hit me at once. What have I been thinking about for the past eight months? Like, where has my brain been? Obviously, not on the fact that I’ll be having a real live baby really soon. I’ve thought about being a mom for as long as I knew the concept. Toby and I talked about children on our second month of dating. My whole life, this is something I’ve known I would do. And then last night, I’m all like, “Holy shit, this is fucking crazy!” All at once I realized that I’d go into that hospital, push out a baby, and then just a few hours later they would send us home with this baby. This real person. And then… what do we do? How does life go on from there? That’s not even going into the fact that soon after that I’ll be left alone to keep this whole baby alive and well and thriving. I kept saying, “I just can’t believe this is happening…” and apparently that’s a weird thing to be in disbelief about at this point.

I know I’ll calm down and that I’ll excel at this parenting thing, but right now… I’m truly in a state of disbelief.