...When September Ends

(Pre-script: To get your money's worth out of this post, including but not limited to, more things than I have time to list here, first go down to the playlist and click on the song, " Suddenly I See," then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...) (...still waiting...)

Last night, while driving, I heard the song "Wake me up when September ends," by Greenday*. Anytime I hear that song, I am instantly, magically teleported back to September 2006, the month of my life that I was 8 months pregnant with my 4th and final baby. All I wanted to do was get through September and be in October, where I was starting to visualize the birth of the baby, the completion of a season in my life. I saw September as this great obstacle looming in front of me, taunting me, laughing at me, "you have to get through me first, you have to get through me first." and it was right. And I hated September '06 for that. If you had gained 80lbs in a single baby pregnancy, you would have hated September '06, too. I know, I know, 80 lbs, how did I do that, right? Trust me,you could, do it too, if you really applied yourself. Apparently I had no trouble applying myself; I applied myself real well. One of my tricks was to bake fresh brownies every night and eat as many as I could while they were still warm. I ate them as though they were oxygen. Yes, now that I think about it, that is the perfect description of how I ate them; like I was trying to replace them for the actual oxygen my body was missing. Because 80 lb weight gain pregnant girl here also couldn't breathe. If I would have been able to breathe, then maybe some signals would have been sent to my brain, namely the common sense ones, like "If you consume brownies like oxygen, you will end up gaining 80 lbs, and you are not going to be birthing an 80 lb baby. No one in the history of the world has ever birthed an 80 lb baby. It would be terrifying." Oxygen deprived brain didn't get the memo. Although it is also true that if oxygen deprived brain HAD gotten the memo, it would have thrown the memo out my other ear, and continued valiantly on the brownie conquering quest. Because I also needed comfort for the other ailments I was enduring, namely the loss of feeling in my fingertips, the inability to sleep laying down, the impatience of knowing that my baby was there, just on the other side of my skin, mere millimeters away, but also not quite here, and I just wanted her to hurry up and get here, already, baby..because having to wait for things is something that patient people should have to do, not impatient people. And did I mention that I couldn't breathe? Because I couldn't. Just so you know.

Occasionally and often, people would look at my pregnant self and declare that, not to worry, whatever weight I'd gained was all baby.**

Blink

blink.

Oh, really?

Well if that's true, then baby is going to have to explain why she left all of her luggage behind. After enduring the trauma of a huge epidural needle in my back that did not work, so that I was then subjected fully to the most excruciating pain of my life, so that I was yelling at everyone for release from this miserable existence, and was mentally and emotionally practically in another realm, seeing angelic visions and my life flashing before my eyes, and possibly a bright light, which could have also just been the hospital light but still, while the flesh and blood midwives around me looked at me funny and told me I was just fine, just fine, Excuse me???? After all THAT,

it took me 9 months to unload all of her luggage.

And she was worth it.

So were the brownies.

-XOXO,

*For some reason this song always came on when I was in the grocery store...(DJ's think it's funny to do things like that, play a song with the word "September" in it often during the month of September)...and I was probably there to buy more brownie mix.

**These are not the same people who looked at me funny and asked if I was carrying multiples. These are not the same people (okay, 1 person) who said that my pregnant belly looked like a huge zit that needed to be popped. These are not the same people who (okay, I person, again.) took one look at the 3 children hovering around my pregnant belly and said that I must be crazy. Those are different stories for another day.