**

I’d been feeling mildly apprehensive for a few days now, because it seems like Thor just isn’t wiggling as much as he was for a while.  I figured maybe I was just getting used to it, not noticing it as much, or that just maybe – god forbid – he simply wasn’t moving much.  But last night, what with the feeling better & all (ok, and because I had those chocolate mints after dinner and chocolate REALLY seems to set me off) I started out the night sitting up for the first time in a week or so.

ka-Pow! punch-a-punch-a-punch-a!  wigglewigglewigglewiggle-squirm!

It seems that my ‘propped up in bed’ position is either really comfortable for him, or really uncomfortable.  Whatever.  A relief that he’s still capable of knocking my book off my belly when he’s feeling so inclined.

**

Today is the first day of my 27th week.  Holy shit.  We’re creeping up on ‘decent chance of viability’ here.  It’s all starting to feel much more real now – in part, I think, because of how solicitously strangers treat me now that I’m obviously showing.  In this last week I’ve had women in line for a Starbucks’ restroom offer to cut me ahead of them.  I’m having to eat my previous complaints about young men never offering a seat on the subway, because, really, quite a few young men have offered in the last few days – going far out of their way to get my attention, even, which is really unusual.  It’s fun, but it also makes me thoughtful in a way I didn’t expect.  Let’s see if I can articulate it even though this is feeling really nebulous in my mind.

I guess because other than the back-pain issues (which seem to be getting a bit better) I’m having an easy beginning to my third trimester.  Second trimester was a breeze.  This ‘growing a person’ stuff is sort of fun!  Yeah, I’m awkward in motion, and by the end of the day, my feet look like Jabba-the-Hutt’s flippers, but I’m not suffering here.  I’m still over-the-moon giddy with happiness that this little person is on his way into the world.  Physical discomfort?  Pah.  No biggie, in the long-run – especially when contrasted with what the last few years have been like.

So to be deferred to, pampered – babied, even – by strangers as well as friends & acquaintances, is nice but I don’t feel worthy.

Or rather, I feel sad that during all those times during the last few years when a kind hand extended by a stranger might have startled me out of my numbed disbelief that this horror was my life the kind hand was usually nowhere to be seen.  

I vividly recall the day I learned of my last miscarriage, I was hurrying down the escalator at the Lexington Avenue stop trying to get home before I fell apart completely, and a woman had come to a dead stop on the ‘walking side’ of the escalator.  I excused myself but brushed past her because I desperately needed to get to someplace relatively private (the end of the downtown platform) where I could clean up my face and try to stop the tears that just wouldn’t stop.  ”How rude,” I heard her hiss to her friend as I hurried down the moving stairs, and her comment just capped off the worst day of my life.

Of course she had no way of knowing it was the worst day of my life, but it still stung more than it should have, because I was already feeling so raw, so horrified by what my life had become.  So now?  When people go out of their way to be nice, I’m grateful because it’d be a drag to have my buzz bummed out because someone was randomly mean to me, but truly?  I don’t need it the way I needed it last August.   Or last March.  Or 2 Decembers ago.  Or July of 2008.

I suppose it could also be that my experiences of the last few years have sort of innured me to the discomforts of pregnancy, so what feels like a minor issue to me looks like a major hardship to folks who have no idea what the last few years have been like for me.  

I certainly don’t need pity right now (though that cut to the head of the restroom line was awesome and MUCH appreciated by my overworked pelvic floor muscles).  But people trying to make a good day even better?  That, I can accept gratefully.

If not gracefully.  (Because really? I was told today that my gait resembles that of an arthritic duck, and I’m pretty sure that’s being kind.  When I hobble to the bathroom at 1am I’m thinking I look more like a crippled, 108-year-old arthritic duck.)