Present

I remember dreaming about my future when I was ten years old. I would be beautiful with hair that never got frizzy. Books would be published, literary history made. Lovely me in the lovely future would be married to a handsome man and have a family full of creative, curly headed wunderkinds. You know...typical pre pubescent princess speak. Ten year old me never imagined nine months of pregnancy, three of which would be spent waddling. Could not have envisioned a world in which my stomach was bigger than the sum of all my parts. And poor frizzy headed Meggi certainly never expected the weekly humiliation of the OB-GYN's office the last month of pregnancy.

I had my second to last appointment today and I can hear ten year old me crying all the way from 1995.

Good news first. Viola Honey seems to be doing just fine. Good heart beat. Big head. Basically everything I expect from the product of my womb.

Not as excellent. I am 37 weeks and the little munchkin is still breech, breech, breech. Trying to avoid a c section, so I am off to the hospital on Tuesday to see if we can get the Honeypi turned around. Viola's vitals will be monitored while the doctor's practice a technique called inversion and try to coax her head from under my ribs to right above my, ahem, you know. (Why a human's head has to be in either of these places only God can tell...) With all the breech talk I failed to ask my OB what exactly an inversion entails. So I made a few calls to the more educated members of my family and was given answers ranging from, "I think they use magnets" to the graphic description of how vets deal with breech horses. ( Breech horses: The words "butt" and "digging" were used more than once, as was the phrase "up to the elbow". Magnets, however, do not seem to be involved.)

Disturbing.

The wrong angle baby talk was followed by a cervical exam. I have never seen a cervical exam, but I have FELT them. Absolutely barbaric, in my opinion. We can put a man on the moon, science has unraveled DNA, somehow The View has reached 15 seasons. And still. Still! The accepted method for measuring a dilated cervix is to shove two fingers followed by an arm into a woman's, you know, and scramble around? Really?

Is *that* the best we can do?

The doctor spent, what I felt to be, an inordinately large amount of time up there. Finally, he emerged. Apparently he had to measure three times to make sure that what he was feeling was what he was feeling. (I could have told him that it was. Now, please remove your person from inside my person. Thanks.) He was so amazed that he told the nurses all about it while we were scheduling the inversion in the hall...

" A four! Dilated to a four at just 37 weeks. Just great! I mean, I wasn't sure. I had to measure a couple times." At which point, he thrust his arm into the air, two fingers extended and pantomimed the measuring of my, until then, very private cervix. "I just hope that we can get that baby turned around and take advantage of that cervix! Don't want to miss out on that opportunity!"

What could I do but agree? A fully ripened cervix is a horrible thing to waste. (Can we get that stitched on a pillow somewhere?)

I would argue that one does not know humiliation until one witnesses the dramatic re-enactment of an exam done on one's vagina.

Just one of many things in the present that ten year old me could never have imagined in the past. It's alright. Surprisingly, all the things everyone tells you are worth it are actually worth it. Sure, the future held laundry, forgotten bills and publicly pantomimed cervical exams. There have been tantrums and vomit and all nighters (and that was just from Riley). But the future also had a good man, and a sweet home and a good little girl with my frizzy hair and her daddy's eyes. Oh happiness that we get to add another little human being to our happy mess. Just two weeks.

We can't wait to make her part of our present.