At first the idea of bedrest seemed pretty heavenly. I imagined lying on my couch with a lap top shopping for deals for my new baby on eBay, watching endless movies and catching up on all the reading I had wanted to do over the past few years but never found the time for. And, well, it was sort of like that. But as daydreams go, it wasn’t quite that simple.
The first few weeks went pretty smoothly, though. I ordered several parenting books from the library but found it was easier to pass the time with so-called Chick Lit and David Sedaris essays that I had read several times before. I got back into the soap opera I watched with my mother as a child and then again in college. That only lasted about a month though because I had a hard time watching all those perfect looking women in cocktail attire sashay through their estates complaining of their awful, implausible, poorly written lives.
My husband was great at first, too. He would come home from work with take out or make us stir fry for dinner. He did the laundry, took out the trash and sat patiently as I, desperate for human contact, talked his ear off for about two hours every night when he came home. So even as the days of solitude and bad daytime television began to wear on me, he was a good sport. I was even getting regular back and neck massages.
But I guess all good things come to an end. The laundry started to pile up and when he did do it, instead of putting it away once he took it out of the dryer he would dump it, unfolded, on the sectional couch next to my reading and television spot. His passive-aggressiveness was not lost on me. Sometimes I would fold it, but sometimes I would just glare at the pile all day and when he came home instead of a sweet hello the first words out of my mouth were, “So, what are you going to do about all this laundry?”
I was only supposed to get up to use the bathroom and to shower and as the months dragged on, I wondered as many women do (on bedrest or not) whether this pregnancy would last forever. I had bought all these cute maternity clothes but found it most comfortable to lay around in a tattered cotton nightie (in less kind circles also known as a muu muu) that once belonged to my grandma, seriously it was hers back in the 1970s. My big days out were my weekly OB/GYN appointments. On those days I would blow dry my hair, put on make up and enjoy the ride (driving was off limits too) with my husband from Centerville to downtown looking at all the life outside my passenger side window on highway 48.
There was a short reprieve at seven months. It looked as if the placenta has migrated upwards a little. This was fantastic news and my status was changed from full time bedrest to partial bedrest. This meant I could get up for about 15 minutes at a time and get out of the house occasionally, as long as I took it easy. I was thrilled to see the insides of movie theaters, restaurants and even Target, once again.
