The post wherein I whine.

Quick! Anyone want to hear the topic of my emotional breakdown yesterday?

So basically, it all boils down to one point. I want to have a baby (good thing, huh?) and it turns out that at this point I don't get one of those without HAVING A BABY.

Right?

Here are my options: stay pregnant. This option sucks. I dream about what it used to be like to walk without thinking about walking. What wonderful ignorance! I used to race around the Emergency Room at work thinking about easy things like what needed to be done next, or possibly what would make someone want to sport a scrub top while wearing khakis and a belt (seems like an strange fashion choice to me, but oddly popular among the male physician sort) without any consideration for my ability to stride along. These days, I don't race anywhere. I sort of-- lumber, I guess. I lumber around the ER, and this is the new commentary in my head: "ow. ow. ow. ow." Oh, and the occasional "make another pregnancy joke at my expense and--pelvic pain or not--I swear I'll manage to balance long enough to kick you solidly in the shins."

For example, sometime last week I slowly and painfully made my way from one end of our 70+ bed ER to the other to provide a patient with some substance abuse resources. Right about the time I'm asking about the patient's withdrawal history, his friend glances up and notices, apparently for the first time, that the girl standing across the bed from him with the list of methadone clinics is visibly pregnant. I presume he felt his next comment was brimming with such incredible genius, so hilarious in its originality, that he simply could not possibly be bothered to wait until the end of my conversation, or, for that matter, the end of the sentence I was in the middle of before interjecting.

"Wow," he said, flatly. "It's a good thing you already work, you know, in a hospital or whatever. Just in case, you know, something, uh, accidentally falls out of there." Gestures helpfully at my swollen abdomen as if waiting for response.


Blink. Blink blink.

So that's option one, and it includes a million trips to the bathroom and lack of bladder control and exhaustion and pain.

Option two is have a baby.

Don't get me wrong. There's clearly a major upside here. Also, I presume it does become the only physically possible option at some point in the future, but let's ignore that for a minute the way I did during my emotional breakdown yesterday.

Having a baby requires pushing that baby out. And then dealing with the physical aftermath of pushing that baby out. And then there's no sleep for what seems like the foreseeable future and discomfort of innumerable types and bodily locations. Plus I have a two year old this go-round who I fear is quite smart enough to get in all kinds of trouble while I am caring for the wee one.

So at this point I'm faced with the following two scenarios.

1: Pain and exhaustion.
2: Pain and exhaustion.

This is the part where you remind me of the delicious way a new baby smells, with a little bald head nestled under my chin. (Or hairy head. I'm open to that, too.) Little tiny feet and fingers and round soft little cheeks all connected to those warm little bodies. Can someone just remind me of that part? Because right now I'm caught between the horrors of maternity waist bands and postpartum mesh underwear, and I can't decide which is worse.