TMI Thursday: You might want to skip this one if you've never had a baby but plan on having one someday...

The lovely, talented and hilarious LiLu does a weekly segment called TMI Thursdays involving (over)shares of embarrassing, humiliating stories about her life (and if you're thinking of clicking over there, just know that it's not for the faint of heart).  Readers and fellow bloggers are invited to join in. I admire her and her readers' willingness to just put it all out there.  

I've never participated, not because I don't have ridiculous and embarrassing stories to share, but because my mother reads this blog. And my brothers. And some of my cousins. And many of my friends. And the friends I generally don't worry about so much, but there are some things that my mommy just doesn't need to read about on the internets about her precious baby.

But today I'm going to jump into the fray (and I actually already did earlier today -- on Lisa's blog, she and I had a lovely discussion about the consistency of pregnancy poo and the relative merits of Metamucil).   My mother won't mind this one. My brothers might, but whatevs. They'll deal. My friends will likely think to themselves, "Jesus, TMI!"  (Though Elizabeth, dearest, you might want to skip this one.)  But that's kind of the point. In any event, if you're squeamish and don't feel like you can handle the nitty-gritty of what actually goes on during childbirth, you might want to come back and visit another day. 

Seriously. You've been warned.

I was sitting in the break room at work today having something to eat, when one of my coworkers walked in.  We said "hello," and she asked me how I was feeling.

"Are you doing OK in this heat?"

"Yeah, I'm fine.  The heat doesn't really bother me.  I did my first pregnancy in Hawaii, so I'm pretty well used to it."

No, the problem isn't the heat.

The problem is that I think this baby is breaking my vagina.

I don't mean just the part from which babies actually emerge -- Zeke already broke that part. I have vivid recollections of the last 20 minutes or so of labor (in other words, 3 hours and 40 minutes into the actual pushing part -- yeah, that's not a typo, I pushed for 4 fucking hours), when Zeke was way down in the birth canal but stuck behind my pelvic bone because even though the ultrasound tech told me he was only about 7 pounds, he was actually almost 9 pounds and was basically too big for my body. And through the pain of feeling like my nether regions were going to split in two, I could hear the sound of scissors, because the doctor was cutting my vajajay open to make way for Zeke's ginormous head. The good news was, I was already in so much pain that I couldn't actually distinguish the pain of having someone cutting me open in that manner from the other pain I was feeling, so in that sense, it didn't really hurt. And he stitched me back up and it healed and whatever. But still, I'm not exactly intact down there.

Anyway, back to the Joey.

Conventional wisdom has it that with boys, you gain less weight and you carry the baby low and out in front, like a basketball. Supposedly, with girls, you carry more weight all over your midsection, and the baby sits higher up on your torso.

I call bullshit. 

Because while I've definitely gained a little bit more weight with the Joey than I did with Zeke (and starting 10 pounds heavier this time around didn't help), I feel like she is sitting -- no, make that pushing -- on the absolute lowest part of my pelvic floor, as if she's trying to crack the bone right in two.  It's different from the typical lower abdominal muscle stretching that goes on as the baby grows.  This is lower down, and feels like the stretching of the muscles and the weight of the baby are putting too much pressure on the bone itself.

So in addition to the standard pregnant-lady waddle, I've got kind of a gimpy thing going on.  I sometimes want to just put my hands down there and walk around holding my cooter together.  I don't  -- well, not most of the time, anyway.  Sometimes when I'm home alone I'll walk around looking like a 5-year-old who's trying to find a bathroom.  But out in public, I haven't lost all sense of decorum (not yet, anyway).

So if you see me and stop to chat, and I get this sort of distracted, vacant look in my eyes, it's not that I'm bored or blowing you off.  It's just that my vagina hurts.