Winning at Therapy

So many sessions back in therapy, I had been talking about my anxieties with my health, especially my health during the first month of pregnancy, and how it would affect the baby. I have a lot of problems with my body, the way it fails me, and my ideas about my fitness to breed. I would be stricken with anxiety attacks that would last hours that I wasn't meant to have children,that my body would inevitably do something to harm Lorelai or that she would be unable to develop correctly because of me. We had talked in therapy about the coming anatomy scan, if good news would alleviate my anxiety, and how I felt I might feel afterwards.

I told the therapist honestly that I felt that a good anatomy scan would alleviate these specific fears but that I felt that my constant anxiety would just redirect itself to the next milestone and that I would stop worrying about the development of organs and possible birth defects and that I would start worrying about making it to the date of viability (24 weeks), and the growth of the baby from there.

To tell the truth, I do sometimes worry about Lorelai's growth. When my sugar is high, I chastise myself that if I'm not more careful, I'll be saddling her with prenatal obesity. I am very hard on myself when it comes to my blood sugar and my health, maybe too hard on myself as I'm learning through therapy. However, one thing I haven't worried about is the 24 week milestone. It comes tomorrow.

So here we are, more or less at viability. And I'm not worried about Lorelai. I do sometimes, in the dark of the night when I feel most anxious, have fleeting thoughts that this is all a dream, that it is impossible for me to make it to the point where we have our little girl home in our arms, and that there is so much longer to go that anything could go wrong. I do fear stillbirth. I greatly fear getting through pregnancy and not through labor, knowing that I am at higher risk for a stillbirth because I am diabetic. But I am trying to focus on the good, on the Christmases to come with our child, on seeing her smile and babble, and having her home.

I'm trying to learn to just trust that things will be okay and that here we are, and we've come too far to fail. It's hard, and I'm still struggling to keep a handle on anxiety, but I've had two of the best weeks I've ever had. One of them was even without medication, during one of the most stressful times of the year for me. I'm taking that as a win.