Preparations for a Journey
There’s a suitcase in my room, half-packed, with a lengthy packing list on top of it. Yesterday I spent hours burning new playlists onto CDs and updating my iPod with songs of a certain mood. We’ve made countless purchases—a “boombox” (to fulfill battery-only hospital requirements), cute pajamas, a robe, slippers, a battery-operated fan, a birth ball—to assist us in this very specific endeavor. We’ve made cheat-sheets about labor and pain-management strategies. And last night it occurred to me that we’ve done more shopping, planning, and preparation than we did for our two-week trip to Japan—for an occasion that will be 24-48 hours, start to finish, at the most (knock wood).
It definitely feels like we’re embarking on some sort of lengthy, involved journey, not just preparing to take a five-minute drive to the hospital, and both the extent and the atmosphere of these preparations feel the same as those that always go into anticipating a major trip— with some significant differences, of course. We’ve been a lot of places—made a lot of travel plans—but preparing to go to the hospital to have this baby feels bigger somehow. Obviously. First, pain is involved; with the exception of some headaches after nights of drinking too much wine on a tapas crawl in Granada, or stomach issues arising from eating little but meat for seven straight days in Romania, pain is usually absent from our trips. Second, we’ll be bringing home a baby, not just a pile of souvenirs. It did take some juggling to get things like a camel-bone-framed mirror from Morocco and a set of sake cups from Kyoto home in one piece; but that’ll be nothing compared to the painstaking care we’ll take and the fear we’ll have as we load up our tiny, screaming, startled newborn into the carseat for the first time and figure out what to do with her once she’s home. We can’t just wrap her in foreign newspapers and packing tape to keep her safe. We’ll have to learn to swaddle.
Finally, there’s the fact that this is one trip that won’t actually ever end. We’ll come home from the hospital, back to our familiar house, but our world will be vastly different than it was before. We’ll unpack—put the CDs back on the shelf—throw some clothes in the washer—get some groceries—but, this time, there will be no “getting back to zero.” Our entire concept of zero will have changed. This time, our passports will stay home. But in a sense we’ll be traveling farther than ever.
It definitely feels like we’re embarking on some sort of lengthy, involved journey, not just preparing to take a five-minute drive to the hospital, and both the extent and the atmosphere of these preparations feel the same as those that always go into anticipating a major trip— with some significant differences, of course. We’ve been a lot of places—made a lot of travel plans—but preparing to go to the hospital to have this baby feels bigger somehow. Obviously. First, pain is involved; with the exception of some headaches after nights of drinking too much wine on a tapas crawl in Granada, or stomach issues arising from eating little but meat for seven straight days in Romania, pain is usually absent from our trips. Second, we’ll be bringing home a baby, not just a pile of souvenirs. It did take some juggling to get things like a camel-bone-framed mirror from Morocco and a set of sake cups from Kyoto home in one piece; but that’ll be nothing compared to the painstaking care we’ll take and the fear we’ll have as we load up our tiny, screaming, startled newborn into the carseat for the first time and figure out what to do with her once she’s home. We can’t just wrap her in foreign newspapers and packing tape to keep her safe. We’ll have to learn to swaddle.
Finally, there’s the fact that this is one trip that won’t actually ever end. We’ll come home from the hospital, back to our familiar house, but our world will be vastly different than it was before. We’ll unpack—put the CDs back on the shelf—throw some clothes in the washer—get some groceries—but, this time, there will be no “getting back to zero.” Our entire concept of zero will have changed. This time, our passports will stay home. But in a sense we’ll be traveling farther than ever.
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