Had my last scan today to check on our little one, and s/he continues to grow well and is healthy and active. I still swing wildly between joy/happy anticipation at meeting and caring for our baby, and a sense of concern/desparate questioning as to what on earth were we thinking bringing a baby into this world and making ourselves solely responsible for their very survival in the early days, and then helping him or her find their place in their world as they grow and develop into a child... adolsecent... adult. All these thoughts have developed depths and layers and complexities that just weren't there when we made the 'let's have a baby' decision. Perhaps that's one of the reasons growing a baby takes so darn long; you need the time to adjust mentally. Or perhaps I think too much; but that's the way I am and I don't want to change it.

In quiet moments (not many of those at the moment as I finish up at work but more planned soon) when I think about my baby's life I find all sorts of unexpected surprises tumbling out of my brain, expectations I didn't know I had, wishes and desires for my baby as s/he grows through life, and this crazy powerful protective emotion beginning to emerge, a lioness protective of her cub whatever the cost.

So much of this is base, raw, biology at work, the human race carrying itself on by triggering powerful hormonal surges of love, protection, empathy towards my unborn child. Basic biology has created and is sustaining this life inside me, and often I feel as though my frontal cortex has very little to do as my body just gets on with it. The same biology will trigger the process of birth and enable me to labour, to birth my child from its cosy womb into this world. I have to trust my body more than I ever have before, I have to allow my 'animal' cortical areas to take over, let the parts of my brain where I reason, rationalise, manage and control sit back for once.

Jodie, as I knew her, has taken on a whole new dimension. This is not something I can simply tack onto the life I had, why was I so naive to think that I could? Ignorance isn't necessarily bliss, but it certainly offers a haven from knowledge and experience sometimes! This is turning the life I had on its head, and in between all the changes, I need and want to create my new life, building on what I am and have and do now while encompassing all that motherhood will be, good and bad. What a journey this continutes to be!