a forty week sublet

Jeff and I found out we were pregnant on July 6th, 2010- the day before Ethan's 4th birthday. This never felt like a coincidence to me.
It has been a bumpy ride. I had (and still have to varying degrees) a conflation of pregnancy related 'ailments' which mean I could quite easily beat down a horde of 12 year old boys in a belching contest.
Two weeks before I found out I was pregnant, I began another odyssey of sorts... I found that even my amazingly high pain threshold was no match for the pain I was feeling or my increasingly worrying lack of mobility. This discovery lead me to an orthopedist, an acupuncturist, a physical therapist, an orthotics and prosthetics specialist and a bevy of orthopedic surgeons! Oh my!
The rub on that side of the story is this; I need 2 major orthopedic surgeries on my left foot/ankle/Achilles tendon and of course; won't be having them any time soon because my body is (quite literally) otherwise occupied at the moment!
Last week I was talking about the pregnancy with Jeff and came up with this gem- "Its like my body is an apartment and I'm the benevolent but rather unskilled landlady!" The tenants are fine, they have all the basic necessities covered...The outside of the building, however, is falling apart!
I don't think that feeling is unique to me, I'm sure in fact, that many pregnant women feel that way for some if not all of their pregnancy; overjoyed by the fact that their family is expanding, petrified and appalled at how little they actually feel like themselves or how little how they feel matters to anyone else, save perhaps partners and immediate family.
I've been shocked by some of the reactions I've gotten from friends, medical workers, the public and sadly, not so shocked, sometimes in the same moment.
There's the close local friend who worried that I would have trouble negotiating Portland sidewalks with a stroller or the prenatal nurse who suggested a particular OB because she was "tolerant"... Or the in laws who were concerned about "birth defects" and wanted to know if Cerebral Palsy was genetic.
I think the answer to all of those inquiries is no. Just no. Because while I know that it is, at least in part, my responsibility to educate, elucidate, assuage fears, right now I just don't have the time.
I'm too busy dealing with my own conflicting emotions. I can't tell you how overjoyed I was when all of the genetic tests came back "little to no risk" or, how simultaneously disgusted I was with my reaction.
We don't know the baby's sex yet and won't know anything about gender for quite a few years, I'm determined to raise this child in as gender-free an environment as possible and I'm quite vocal on the subject. Why is it so difficult for me to advocate just as vociferously for my right to raise this child in an environment that with not laden with ableist judgments or expectations.
I have climbed mountains in several countries, jumped out of a plane over the Sahara desert, gone sand boarding in the Namib, catapulted myself onto moving passenger trains with 6 foot platforms in Eastern Europe, as a post-coffee ritual. I have worn impractical, ridiculous shoes in all kinds of weather, while treading over cobblestones.
I can negotiate a city street with a stroller, I can explain to anyone and everyone the difference between condition and disease, that there is no such thing as a birth defect, that we are all different and that each of us gets to decide how to identify and what our particular set of skills and weaknesses, likes and dislikes are, over I can welcome this pregnancy as yet another in an ongoing chain of adventures.
I can welcome this child into the world without any deeper expectation then that they be who they are. I can provide them that space.