On A Precipice

There are so many moments in our lives where we hesitate to do something scary, but we just have to push ourselves to do it anyway. As a child, it was things like jumping out of the second story window when our parents weren't home, attempting to do a back flip on the trampoline for the first time, or doing a back dive into the swimming pool. Now that I'm an adult, it's getting up in sacrament meeting to bear my testimony. At times like these I pause and ask myself certain questions. "Am I really going to do this?" "Can't I get hurt?" "What if I make a fool of myself?" "Am I really going to do this?"

When it's something physical, I just force myself to do it, and let fate or time or gravity take over. When Brian was in high school he and his friends would jump in the Columbia River on New Years Eve. He's kept up the tradition off and on since we've been married, and this last year was the first time I joined him. We drove down to the dock at Howard Amon Park, stripped to our swimsuits, and stood there, looking at the water. "Am I really going to do this?" I asked myself. "I want to do this," I told myself. "I've just...got...to...jump!" And by the time my feet left dock, there was no turning back. For a moment I was in the air, and then gravity pulled me into the water.

Now, from everything I've read, giving birth seems nothing like jumping off of a dock into frigid cold water. There's no immediate consequence of your actions. You can't say, "Okay, I've just got to do this," and moments later you've got a baby in your arms. It can take hours. Although it is true that once it starts, there's no turning back.

If all goes well tomorrow morning, Brian and I will go to the hospital to be induced. For the past two or three weeks I've woken up every morning thinking that this could be the day, and I've been so impatient to have the baby here. Now that a decision has been made, and the baby is coming, I'm holding back, asking myself, "Can I really do this?" Having never delivered vaginally before, this is all new territory. I've done my research, and I've got a good doctor, and I know that no matter how things turn out, the only thing that really matters is having a healthy baby at the end.

So here goes. I'm going to do it, and I'm going to do my best. There's no turning back now.