I was listing this maternity pattern in the Etsy shop yesterday, whilst I was in the midst of a nervous breakdown. You see, I have a daughter who is pregnant. As in, VERY pregnant, and at that stage where she is ready to go any day (due the end of November-ish) and is miserable. As in, TOTALLY miserable.
I will preface this by saying how very, very much I love my daughter. I love her to pieces, actually. She is the middle child and only daughter, and she is a huge piece of my heart. But my Lord, does that girl make me insane at times. To be honest, she always has, and she knows it, because she didn’t sleep thru the night until she was almost four, never napped, and spent a lot of time screaming, all the way into teenagerhood and beyond. She is beautiful and brilliant, and the best mommy ever (we can’t figure it out, given her hatred of literally everyone for years. We are sure her husband is the one to credit for calming her down), but my gosh does she lose her mind when she is pregnant.
She hates the medical community so much. Never trusts them. Hates going to the doctor and generally feels that the medical community is ignorant. Remember, I have forty years of experience as a nurse, and her father was a nurse as well, so it’s not like she wasn’t surrounded by it growing up. I’m not sure why she hates the medical community so much, except for the fact that she had three sets of tubes in her ears in childhood, so literally every time she saw a doctor she had an ear infection and they were hurting her. She also hates medical insurance (which, to be fair, most Americans do, because it’s terrible here), and her insurance is terrible. When she had her second baby, her bill was hundreds of dollars more than her first one, despite the fact that she was in the hospital a day less, so this doesn’t help her argument about how useless insurance is. I know, without it she’d really be lost, but if we have insurance, we expect stuff to be paid, when in reality the scam that is American healthcare means that insurance companies exist in order to find ways not to cover you.
So yesterday, when she’d been without sleep and was exhausted, I suggested that perhaps the contractions she has been having are, in fact, early labor. She hadn’t timed them so she didn’t know, and thought maybe she’d call the doctor. I told her they’d just send her to the hospital to be checked, which she didn’t want to do, because she’d get billed hundreds of dollars unless they kept her, and she was sure they wouldn’t. So she called the doctor, and they told her “just what I knew they would tell me” – probably because it was exactly what her mother the OB nurse had already said. She of course refused to go in, so she timed her contractions instead. I asked how far apart they were. “They’re not regular.” I asked again, how far apart? “They’re not regular.” ::sigh:: “What is the longest interval you have gone between contractions?” “Eleven minutes. Three minutes. Six minutes. Two minutes.” So, I told her, she could be in early labor. Then I got eleventy thousand reasons why she’s not in labor. I offered to bring the girls home with me so she could rest. No, she’d be fine, she said.
Three hours after I got home, she texted and said she was six minutes apart, and to keep my phone nearby in case I needed to come get the girls. Dear Lord in heaven, why can’t she listen to me? Why? Because the last baby she had, she was admitted to the hospital at 11:30pm, and because she was admitted half an hour before midnight, insurance counted it as a full day and she had to go home a day earlier than she should have had to. Yes, I know this makes no sense because she hates the healthcare community, but once she’s at the hospital, she wants every minute she’s entitled to, so she is not going to go the hospital until after midnight. I’m telling you, I do not drink enough for this.
So today she is contracting but not as much. Still in denial that it’s early labor or that she will have the baby before mid-month at least, even though she was told she could go anytime last week at her appointment. Her labors are fast, but darned if she will go to the hospital until the last minute, so I’m convinced that she is destined to have the baby in the middle of the living room floor at this point, because no matter when he decides to appear, she is not going in until she is 100 percent positive that they will keep her.
I swear she has lost her mind. Meantime, she’s not sleeping and is terribly uncomfortable and is in denial that she can go into labor because she wants her husband to be off work for Thanksgiving, and he only has two weeks off after the baby is born. She is all. over. the. place.
So dear Lord, save me from the pregnant daughter and PLEASE let her go into labor soon, because I can’t deal with this level of crazy on top of caring for my mom and my husband.
Pattern available in the Etsy shop here.
The Vintage Fashion Librarian 