Good ol' Braxton Hicks

I always thought that the third trimester of pregnancy would be a lot like being an inflatable airbed. Your soft baby belly would just keep getting bigger and bigger until you were about to pop. Then just in time, you'd wake up one night with contractions or your water broken and you'd know, "This is it." You'd roll over, gently wake your husband and off you'd go into labor.

Not so much with me. This pregnancy has been so full of fun surprises (leg cramps, shortness of breath, peeing while sneezing) that I guess I shouldn't expect these last few weeks to be any different. Before we embarked on this journey, neither Dave nor I had ever heard of such things as the mucus plug or perineal massage (yet another reason to keep your kitchen well-stocked with olive oil). And before our childbirth classes I thought the "Ring of Fire" was a Johnny Cash song, not the burning sensation you feel down there when your baby is crowning.

I'm still trying to get my head around effacement. Dilation sounds simple enough: your cervix opens centimeter by centimeter during labor until the opening is large enough for the baby's head to fit through and you can start pushing. Effacement is the shortening of the cervix. It starts happening before dilation (I think) whereby the contractions start pulling up the tissues at the base of your cervix, making the cervix thinner and thinner so it can start opening (dilating). This, appropriately enough, is called "ripening."

At my check-up last week, the midwife said I was already 75% effaced and 1 centimeter dilated. The baby's head was "engaged" and she could feel it right there, at the base of my cervix. It didn't mean I was going into labor tomorrow, she said, because apparently some women walk around being 4 centimeters dilated for weeks before giving birth (nature can be cruel). But it meant my body was definitely getting ready.

John Braxton Hicks

That made sense to me, given that I've been having contractions for weeks. This too, can be "normal" in the third trimester, as the uterus "practices" for the main event. They're called Braxton Hicks contractions, named after a man of course, an English doctor who noticed in 1872 that many women felt contractions in the later stages of pregnancy without going into actual labor.

The thing about Braxton Hicks contractions, however, is that they are supposed to cause only "mild discomfort." They aren't painful like actual labor, according to everything I've read on my iPhone at 2 a.m. when one of them has woken me out of a dead sleep, freaking me out with the sensation of my belly seizing up from the bottom of my rib cage to the base of my pelvis.

Some women don't even notice them. But not me. Oh no, I'm one of the lucky ones who gets the sensation multiple times a day that my mid-region has turned into a snare drum, my abdominal muscles torqued over my already compromised major organs with an intensity that feels a whole lot stronger than "mild discomfort."

A few weeks ago they got so intense that I was convinced I was going into preterm labor. I agonized that I wouldn't get the chance to wear the gorgeous blue maternity dress I'd bought for my baby showers and Dave's graduation (because in the end, it's all about fashion). A frantic call to my midwife confirmed that until the contractions grow continuously stronger and fall into a rhythmic pattern, it's nothing more than an unnerving dress rehearsal.

With less than three weeks to go now and the baby showers and Dave's graduation safely behind us, my job is to stay as hydrated as possible. Hydration is supposed to ease "false labor," so I've been drinking glass after glass of refreshing water. The byproduct, of course, is multiple trips to the bathroom per hour. This slow (and annoying) build up to actual labor, I might add, is nothing I've ever seen featured in movies. Guess it's not as dramatic as gushing water and a mad dash to the hospital. 

One day soon, one of these contractions is going to mean we're actually going to meet our baby. When that happens, a thousand mothers have told me, all of this "mild discomfort" will become a distant memory. I'm not so sure. But I am willing to concede that it will probably be worth it.