moving right along

On Friday, I had my first appointment with the ob-gyn. The regular baby doctor. The one that millions of women go to every year because they are pregnant, as most women can be, without any particular effort or worry. (Not that millions of women go to my doctor, but - oh, you get the point.)

I, myself, felt like a giant fraud. Like the nurses were going to look at me and say, "you? You can't be pregnant. You don't get pregnant! Why are you here?"

Everyone acted like my being there was so normal, and as if everything was just going to go along perfectly fine, and it completely freaked me out. The nurse chatted away about what would happen at the various appointments, and told me I needed to pre-register for delivery at the hospital before my next appointment in a month. The doctor talked about various stages of development and gave me some suggestions for the near-constant nausea, and the whole time, all I could do was think, "but what if something happens? What if something goes wrong? Why is everyone so freaking optimistic around here? What is wrong with them? Don't they know how damn-near impossible it is that I AM EVEN HERE?"

What's wrong, of course, is me. It is a miracle that I'm pregnant - a miracle brought to us by the grace of God and by the smarts and skills of a whole lot of medical people - but, the truth is, there's nothing to suggest that anything will go wrong at this point. The baby was measuring a few days ahead, actually, and the heartbeat was flickering away, and everything looked just fine. I, of course, asked the doctor about the chances of miscarriage, and she said "less than 5%," which you'd think would help - and it does - but I still find myself incapable of relaxing into this pregnancy.

The doctor said that was normal. I'm sure it is, although it's not a whole lot of fun. We're talking about how to tell my church - a step so public it nearly makes me want to throw up, as if I wasn't heading that direction already - and I keep trying to convince my husband to put it off, wait just a little longer. In a few more weeks I'll be out of the first trimester, and I still am afraid to say anything, just in case.

Somehow, somewhere, there is a part of me which believes that my worrying about things makes them happen (or not happen, if that's the better alternative). This is the part of me that hates flying, that worries the whole flight about the wings falling off and the engines quitting and the pilot dying of a heart attack, and acts as if my worrying about those things is the barrier which prevents them from happening. As if my worrying keeps the plane in the air.

And this part of me, this dark-and-twisty part of me, remains convinced that somebody has to remember the risk factors here, somebody has to keep saying, "just in case," and who better than me? Aren't moms supposed to worry? Isn't that their job? (Did you just learn something about my mom? And her mom? Hell, yeah.)

Today, I am taking cupcakes to my RE's office. I want to say, "thank you." I want to stop saying, "just in case." Cupcakes help with most things. Maybe they'll help with this too.