Pregnancy is a wonderful time of growing life and love for couples. It can also be a time of great difficulty for young couples, and most especially for the new mother to be. The seventh month of gestation is often the single most difficult time, a time when a woman most needs all the love, support, and patience her husband can muster. Her belly is swollen and heavy, and various hormones are racing around in her system, making everything worse. Her husband’s love is sometimes the only thing that she can truly count on. The following anecdote comes from Dawne’s pregnancy with our first child.
It was the first week of August, and summer’s heat was in full effect. Most days saw us sweating by 9 in the morning, with the heat nowhere near its daily afternoon peak. At 7 months pregnant, Dawne could not get comfortable for love nor money. Sitting was uncomfortable. Getting up again was uncomfortable. Standing? Forget about it. The heat only served to magnify all her aches and pains, sapping her strength, and leaving her desperately wishing for her pregnancy to end.
On one particular day, I had just arrived home from an emergency ice cream run. I arrived back home hot, tired, and hoping against hope that the ice cream had not melted during the 15 minutes from store to door. Pausing in front of the welcome hurricane the fan presented, I called out to Dawne, letting her know that the ice cream was home. Mildly puzzled by her lack of response, I put the ice cream in the freezer, and headed for the bedroom expecting to find her there, napping the oppressive heat away.
She wasn’t there. Concerned, I called out again, to hear only silence answering me back. I began a room by room search of our small apartment, eventually finding her in the bathroom, stark naked. Not just naked, though, oh no. She was precariously perched, balancing on the tub’s edge, looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“What are you doing, baby?”
She turned her head, and looking at me with tear misted eyes, cried out, “I’m so huuuuuge!” I couldn’t help but to chuckle as I lifted her down to safety, for to me she had never been so beautiful in her life.
I hope you have enjoyed this little vignette from our lives, and if you are pregnant, or caring for someone who is pregnant, let me offer you my congratulations. If you take anything away from my little story, let it be this: everything that you experience during those long months of creation is more than creating a new baby together, it is starting a family together, and in that, enriching your lives as husband and wife. You are creating fond memories to found the rest of your lives upon.
One Comment
With 5 full term pregnancies behind me, and happy to look forward to grandbabies in the years to come, this was beautiful..