19 Apr Babies are weird

Posted at 01:26h in Feelings by Kate Austin-Avon 1 Comment

My sister asked me this morning some questions about when in your life you stop being grossed out or scared by pregnancy and childbirth. I don’t know if I ever stopped! But my answer was something like this:

So yes, it is completely weird that there are eyeballs and fingernails INSIDE of my uterus right now. That there is a heartbeat and a whole new set of organs. And that I can feel another human being move inside of me. It’s so very very very weird. I remember having that conversation with pregnant friends like the caterpillar to the butterfly – there’s an alien, a whole living being INSIDE OF YOU. Isn’t that WEIRD!?

It’s totally weird! It’s beyond anything a sci-fi author or Apple innovator could dream up. It’s bizarre and super weird. But it’s nature. It’s evolution. It’s what’s meant to be and it’s how we all got here. It’s perfect. It’s a crazy coincidence that fertilization is even possible, which is also totally weird.

It’s exactly as weird as the fact that our brains make our bodies move, that putting a piece of fruit in your mouth and moving your jaw around and swallowing gives you energy, that sunlight and water somehow make plants grow. It’s weird the way our hearts know how to beat and it’s weird that there are so many different animals that work in so many different ways. It’s weird that our bodies process food and water into poop and pee. It’s weird that the clouds rain on us and it’s weird that this planet landed exactly far enough (or close enough) to the sun to make everything work the way it does. It’s weird that because Cory and I decided to, we are making a whole new person.

This whole time I’ve been completely fascinated with the insanely precise process in which a couple of cells somehow magically turn into a person I’m going to love for the rest of my life in a whole new way. Pictures of fetuses always creeped me out before and now I’m just completely enraptured with each new step of the process – the tail this baby once had, the eyelids fusing shut, the breathing amniotic fluid, the cheesy coating and lanugo, the fontanelles. It’s incredible.

In all honesty? I am way WAY more creeped out by my ever-flattening bellybutton and the thought of it popping out. It gives me shivers thinking about it.

… Because THAT is weird.