We are getting there…

I am 35 weeks now. Which means that this baby is getting nice and fat inside me. It also means baby is running out of room in there and I can tell that this baby likes space. Lately it keeps kicking and kicking and kicking, it makes the husband laugh and at night he has tele-kinetic dreams with our child where he can communicate with the baby through some sort of baby-kick-morse-code. It makes me laugh.

So for now I am just waiting for baby and constantly pondering the age-old question of who I want to be and such. Once the husband and I were talking about something feminism related (a favorite topic of mine if you didn’t know) and he brought up a scripture that said:

And so great were the blessings of the Lord upon us, that while we did live upon raw meat in the wilderness, our women did give plenty of suck for their children, and were strong, yea, even like unto the men; and they began to bear their journeyings without murmurings.

When I read it my heart sunk because the husband brought it up to point out the “strong even like unto the men” portion, claiming that men were stronger blah blah blah. I didn’t know what to think of it and I found that when I have questions about things that I feel really passionately about the best thing I can do is wait it out. The answer always comes and it’s always glorious. So I furrowed my eyebrows and I might have hit him. But secretly I was pondering and deciding to wait.

Well yesterday I finally understood the passage. This all has a point….you’ll see.

So being pregnant isn’t all sunshine and rainbows like I idealized (there I go setting expectations). It comes with a lot of hormonal fluctuations and some days you find yourself in a pit of gloom, worried about what kind of mother you will be and if you can handle it and oh my goodness it is sooo hot and I didn’t even sleep last night and I just want to curl up in a ball and wither away on my sheets that need washing. Got it?

So there I was being all moody and weird and my husband was trying desperately to figure out what the heck was wrong with me and then the next day I woke up and it wasn’t much of a day until we did our joint scripture study before bed. We decided to pick back up on reading the Book of Mormon with the studying perspective of “family,” and there we were in 1 Nephi 17 and I started reading and came across that scripture that the husband had brought up awhile back. But this time when I read my mind blossomed like peonies outside my window and I got it (was that too cheesy? sorry).

So these people in the wilderness have been through a lot. Understandably the women complain (we are rather good at it I must agree). So here these women are bearing children in the wilderness (no pain meds at its best people!) and then they have to keep journeying and then they can’t even cook their meat so they are eating raw meat (ew ew ew) and they breastfed all the while (they ate that raw meat FOR their kids, it was a matter of life or death) and after all this I think they realized they were strong, just like the men were in terms of physical strength. It was only after these women went through all of the afflictions of motherhood and sacrificing their appetites so their babies could survive did they realize that, “Hey, I AM strong! I am strong just like any of these fellows out here!”

So after that they stop murmuring. Because they know they can do it.

It wasn’t that they weren’t strong before or that the men were stronger at some point, but I truly believe it was that they had to experience the hardships and get through them to realize that they were strong.

I think I get a little worried about whether I can do it at all, the whole labor-becoming a mom thing. But really it’s inside all of us, the strength to bear through without needing to complain. Because once you realize your strength, you realize all you are capable of and you can slowly stop the whole pity-party thing.

So I am excited for labor whether it happens naturally or not because I know that ultimately it will help me to realize the strength within me.