Long before I got pregnant for the first time, I read and fell in love with Anna Karenina. About halfway through the novel, one of the characters, Kitty, is expecting her first baby. Kitty lives with her husband, Levin, a feudal lord of some sort (it's been a while) out in the country, but as the time approaches for her baby to be born, they return to Moscow for her "confinement," which, as far as I can tell, is a period of time where they keep the expectant mother quiet and resting and basically chained to the house so she doesn't scare people with the size of her belly or the loudness of her bellyaching.
The other day, as I was hanging up the phone after talking to my mom (she was giving me my annual Christmas cookie assignment-- eight kinds, topped off with the warning that the only way I'd get out of making them would be to go into labor), I suddenly had a vision of being Kitty. Most of the characters in Anna Karenina are flawed, but Kitty and Levin are pretty much the most idealized characters in the novel. But even Kitty and Levin get frustrated with the idea of confinement. They find it, well, sort of confining. But at that moment, I was dreaming of being Kitty, forced to spend the last month of my pregnancy in the seclusion of my bedroom, with my laptop and a big pile of books to keep me company. With the screaming, the messes, the endless parties and cookie baking of the holiday season all safely on the other side of the door.
For every pampered and bored Kitty, there were probably a thousand or ten thousand women like O-Lan, from Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. For some reason (and this might be faulty memory or I might be confusing her story with another Buck novel), I remember O-Lan working in the fields near her house throughout her whole pregnancy, and basically walking over to the side of the field (I think she actually did go back to her hut) to squat down and deliver the baby. Within a few days, that baby was strapped to her back and out in the field with her.
I've always thought that having a baby around the holidays would be great, because I'd be so busy that I wouldn't have time to even think about the baby's impending arrival. To a certain extent-- that's probably true. I'm very eager for her to arrive, but it feels like there's just SO much to be done before she can get here. Tonight after dinner I was working on my December calendar, and there's something big on it every day between now and December 16th, when my kids get out of school. Then it abruptly clears, with nothing crowding my days (except for a house full of company) until after my due date. If Maren makes an early appearance, then I probably will resemble O-Lan, with birthing a baby just one more thing to fit into the crazy schedule of the next two or three weeks. But if she comes on time, I'll probably feel like Kitty, confined and bored and eager to meet my baby.
--originally published 12/2/06
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