I have to be honest with you. I am two weeks away from a scheduled C-section and I have not packed a hospital bag.
I have a list. The list is on my phone and has been there for approximately six weeks, growing slowly by the addition of items I think of at two in the morning and then add with the conviction that writing them down is the same as having done them. I have seventeen items on the list. I have gathered approximately three of them.
This is not the version of the second pregnancy I imagined having.
What I imagined was something slightly more composed than this. Something that resembled, in spirit if not in exact detail, the elaborate preparedness of the first time: the carefully assembled kit, the double-checked car seat, the serene and planful run-up to the birth. The sense of being ready. The knowledge that you had done what a responsible person does in the weeks before bringing a child into the world.
What I have instead is this: my insurance changed in April, which meant my hospital changed, which meant my doctor changed, which meant I spent the second trimester reestablishing the basic logistics of a birth that I had previously considered handled. The new hospital is fine. The new doctor is fine. I am not in danger. I am just going to be lying on a table in a room I have never been in before, attended by a team I have only met twice, having a major surgery that I previously felt sorted.
And then my nanny, who was supposed to come back from her holiday break and watch my toddler while I am in the hospital and recovering, sent a message two weeks ago letting me know that she had decided not to return to work. She is fine. She is not in danger. I am just navigating the month before a C-section while also managing full-time work and a full-time toddler with no childcare backup in place.
Also: my toddler has been sick five times in the three months since she started daycare. Five separate illnesses in twelve weeks. She has been handling it well, in the way that two-year-olds handle things, which is to say she has been handling it loudly and with full-body commitment. I have been handling it less loudly but with the specific exhaustion of a pregnant person who is also the primary contact for a sick child’s school and the primary source of middle-of-the-night comfort and also, simultaneously, a person with deliverables at work.
I am listing these things not to gather sympathy, though I will not refuse it if you are offering. I am listing them because when I take a step back and look at the last two months, what strikes me is not how unusual this is. What strikes me is how ordinary this is.
Not ordinary in the sense that this is fine and these are minor inconveniences. They are not minor. A last-minute hospital change weeks before delivery is not a minor inconvenience. The sudden loss of your childcare plan in the month before a surgery and a newborn is not a small thing. I am not trying to minimize any of it, least of all to myself.
What I mean is: this is what parenting actually is. Not the version where you had the plan and the plan held. The version where you had the plan and then something happened, and you adjusted, and then something else happened, and you adjusted again, and you kept going because you had a toddler to collect from daycare and a meeting that started in twenty minutes and no real option to simply stop.
When I was pregnant the first time, I thought being ready was something you could achieve. If you read enough and prepared enough and organized enough, you would arrive at the birth in a state of genuine readiness. Calm, equipped, competent. I have since learned that the version of me that showed up to that birth was not particularly calm. She was as prepared as she could make herself and also scared in a way that preparation could not touch.
I thought the second time would be different. I thought having done it before would mean arriving in a different state. Calmer by virtue of knowledge, if not by virtue of circumstances. I had not accounted for the possibility that the circumstances would be this particular set of circumstances. The changed hospital. The absent nanny. The small sick person who has needed a lot of me in the months when I had less to give.
What I know, two weeks out and slightly unraveled, is that none of it is going to be sorted by the time it begins. There will not be a moment before the C-section where all the variables have resolved. The childcare situation will be as resolved as it is. The familiarity with the new hospital will be as established as two visits can make it. The hospital bag will be whatever I throw into it in the hours before we leave.
And then it will begin, and I will be in it, and I will do what people do when something is happening: I will manage each part as it comes. Because that is, I have come to understand, what the whole project is. Not a state of readiness you achieve before the hard part starts. The ability to keep going inside the hard part, without having achieved readiness, because the hard part is always going to have started before you felt ready for it.
I did not feel ready the first time and the first one arrived and we figured it out. I do not feel ready this time and the second one is going to arrive in approximately two weeks regardless of the status of my hospital bag or my childcare arrangement or my feelings about my new doctor’s bedside manner.
The quiet realization, the one the title is about, is not that it will be fine. I don’t know that it will be fine. I mean that it probably will be, in the way that hard things usually resolve into a new equilibrium over time. But “it will be fine” is a forecast, and I don’t have the angle on this for a forecast.
The realization is simpler than that. It is that this: right now, these two weeks, this particular combination of unsorted variables and persistent exhaustion and a toddler who has been sick again this week, is what the job looks like from the inside. Not a failure of preparation. The job. The actual job. The one where the plan changes and you keep going anyway, because you are the parent and the parent keeps going, and this is what that looks like from inside the part where it is hardest.
I am going to pack the bag this weekend. Some version of it. I am going to figure out the childcare, something, some version of a plan that will hold long enough. I am going to show up to the surgery in two weeks with whatever I have managed to put together by then.
And then the second one will be here. And I will be in it again. The version of me that arrives at that operating table is the one that has been living the last two months of this. Tired, adjusting, still going. That, it turns out, is the version she gets.
