Looking back, ahead, and around

I am 28 weeks, 6 days pregnant. My baby is kicking comfortingly and reliably, and except for some pretty consistent aches and pains, which I guess are normal, I am so far perfectly healthy. I'm so grateful for all of this. My mind's been full, so full I'm having a hard time getting done what needs to be done.

• Recently, we found out a friend had a miscarriage with her first pregnancy at 11 weeks, after having heard a heartbeat.  I cried so hard for the couple, I was heartbroken for them. Having gone through this, knowing how common it is, only makes me so devastated others have to go through it too. I think about all the ways they may be thinking about how right now, they would have been this pregnant; about their due date; about how much it will hurt to see pregnant women or babies; about how people will reassure them that they'll have a healthy child in the future but they will want to respond, "But I wanted *this* baby, now." Or about how when they do get pregnant again, like us, they will be nervous every time they wait to hear that heartbeat, and how they'll have to put up with other people telling them not to be so nervous anymore. 
• I continue to have very mixed feelings about my midwifery care. On the one hand, we went to their practice's natural childbirth class and felt really good about our choice of provider. Their standard practices are sadly not at all standard for care in the U.S., they are instead evidence-based, and as a result their statistics for births are awesome. I can be in the water, off monitors, encouraged to change positions and move throughout labor, and it's apparently normal for them to push in positions other than on the birthing bed. This is the kind of care I have always wanted to give birth since I first picked up "Our Bodies, Our Selves." Yet I continue to be triggered as fuck by my prenatal appointments. With my doula's encouragement, I made a chart note that was very short and insistent, and the midwife who received it was totally okay with sharing it with everyone, although they still don't bring up or ask about my PTSD or the previous pregnancy losses, like the chart note asks them to. One time, one of the shittiest midwives said, reassuringly, "we expect you to call with concerns more often given what you've been through," and that was really what I needed to hear. That was the last time I heard that, in my first--otherwise pretty bad--appointment. Since then, I've heard (from the same midwife) impatience that I'm not feeling okay about this pregnancy yet; and (from another midwife), ignorance that I'd even had a second miscarriage because she doesn't bother checking my chart before coming into meet me. I also asked to hear what's been helpful for other women in my situation--after two appointments, nada. I saw the same okay-midwife for two appointments, but for my next two I'm back to being a ping-pong ball, mostly because of scheduling and partly because I have to meet all of them eventually so I don't freak out meeting a new person when I'm at my most vulnerable and trying to progress in active labor. I have only met *half* the midwives in this practice so far. I dread meeting a new one every time. I don't trust that they'll read my chart, I fear they'll say stupid things (the first awful midwife, when she first met me, asked me in the first few minutes what my "PTSD from sexual violence" was from. When I told my therapist about that, she put her head in her hands because asking someone to justify their diagnosis is so ignorant). I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about what I should be doing better to protect myself and my baby, since I'm only middling-satisfied with how I feel in their care. Then in the morning, I can handle the middling feelings, but after pregnancy losses and the bad care I got for them, and after my experience of trauma, having to trust people who seem only partially trustworthy is hard. I wish I could just see one midwife for the rest of my visits and give myself a break from the anxiety of meeting them, and somehow have met whichever midwife will be on call for my birth. Also, I wish people got that this isn't a side issue, that this matters, me having to struggle to breathe normally before every appointment, me losing sleep dreading my interactions with them. At the birthing class, I even felt fine and positive about it, yet my body still constricted my breathing for the rest of the day. And of course, trouble breathing and my body involuntarily tensing up is going to affect my ability to labor unmedicated. I wish I could just conquer this but I can't. I've been on a years-long quest to do so, and I believe I'll get there, but not by April. It would be so helpful for me to have a provider in the room who I knew for sure got that my traumas are not solely something in the past, that got how miscarriages really affected my ability to "trust in my body," who knew that bringing up the special challenges of being a survivor and having gone through losses in a sensitive way won't make me uncomfortable but instead will let me know that it's okay for *me* to ask for what I need to attend to those issues. My doula is kind of there  in that way but also kind of not interested in it. I'll keep working on this. 
• I've been counting the kicks. It's going okay. I get nervous, panicked sometimes--is this the night we'll have to go to L&D? But then I drink a glass of ice water and everything is fine. I'm trying to use this time as time to just connect with the wisdom of my baby, to get to know my baby, to send it love in the present. 
• I sobbed the other night after the hospital tour, after many hours of getting to the place where I could get in touch with these feelings, that after we have the baby, I will have no family of origin to call to say the baby's born, and no one to ask to come visit. I've made this choice on purpose because interacting with them only upsets me, even after years of asking for what I've needed, but for the rest of my life, I know, I will long for a mom, for a family, who is comforting, supportive, and safe; who I can trust. I want to share my baby, but I want to protect it more, to only have it know adults and friends and family who would protect it from abuse and who would let it express any feelings it has (and who don't make its mother miserable and less able to love it).
• On a very busy work day I was flipping out about having so few maternity clothes that fit and look decent--it's hard to adjust to a new body, and I always hated shopping, and I feel like I'm "doing it wrong," buying a lot of things that don't work out, not buying things that I need to look and feel good. But I knew all the while that I am so, so grateful for this problem. I am so, so grateful to have gotten to this stage of pregnancy. I remember when I wondered if I ever would.