Preoccupied in Pregnancy Journal

I can’t get over how beside myself I am.
Okay, so it’s not that bad. I’m just about the same as I ever was, but thoughts of that peanut seem to have completely taken over every spare moment. Mostly wonderment and curiosity about who this tiny person is. Some tweaking of plans, as I shift projects slightly to compensate. A lot about how our lives will change in unknowable ways.
I’m a pretty dang’d laid back person, as far as my emotional state goes, but I’ve always been a planner. I might be one of the most emotionally unflappable people I know… yet I don’t think it’s from any sort of innate gift. It’s basically just the work of deep thinking, and coming to know what my value system really is. It rests upon unchangeable ideals, and so can never be upended. So even if I don’t happen to have a plan in place or something unexpected comes up… it’s really just… life. I don’t begrudge it. I’m not scared of it, or worried about it. I know it will happen. I might be sad or disappointed about a hope or plan if it’s interrupted, but that is always transitory.
So when an anxiety inducing thought does pop up in my mind… it’s very jarring. It’s alien. I look at it like some sort of fascinating insect I’ve never seen before; because I haven’t.
Recognizing these things is probably the most difficult step of actually dealing with them. I don’t think I’m lucky in that I can easily do it; it’s from long years of deep thinking and questioning my own fundamental belief systems.
Not a few people have brought up the problem of childhood trauma in motherhood; A mother’s own childhood is often brought forward to stare her in the face through the eyes of her infant daughter (most often it is a daughter that triggers this, as all mothers were once daughters). Mothers relive their own infancy through their daughters; any kind of abandonment, stress, unresolved terror, trauma, and failure to attach comes raging back through that lovely little amygdala.
I am intimately aware of the necessity of integrating your internal mother; not your current mom who you probably now get along with and see every weekend or whatever. No, I’m talking about the beautiful perfect goddess of infancy and babyhood. Because they are not the same person. They can’t be. Because an infant or baby and an adult are not the same person; you, the adult you, have choices and power to enforce those choices. The child you had no such freedom or power. How was that vulnerability treated? Protected? Violated?

I’m not mad or anything. I was at first… I was mad that I was denied having a personhood for the first 20 years of my life. But now I’m just… ambivalent about it. It happened. No one can change the past.