Well, here I am, 40 weeks pregnant. I can't believe today is my due date, because it doesn't feel any more significant than the days before it. At any rate, my day started at 3:00 a.m. today when I got out of bed on account of my crazy hormones, insomnia, and inability to lie down without one of my limbs going numb. I've gotten rather used to those wee hours of the night, watching the sun come up from the couch I've spent the majority of the past 40 weeks sitting on. At this point, my entire existence feels like it's been crushed up and whirled in a blender, leaving me entirely discombobulated. My sense of time is pretty much that of a newborn—never quite sure if it's day or night, and never able to act accordingly. I can't seem to move forward or backward, but instead hang and float in what appears to be never-ending stillness and nothingness. My past life, and past self, have long faded away, yet my new life and self still feel so far out of reach. I know I am waiting for my baby, but I'm also waiting to feel connected to this world again, to feel anchored to an identity and move along with time and space like I used to.
In the last 40 minutes, the weather outside has gone from partly cloudy to raining heavily to hailing like crazy to snowing to sunny, bright and clear…..oh, wait, back to snowing…..and back to partly cloudy. I don't know how those weather patterns are possible in such a short span of time, and I wondered for a moment if I had tipped past being a walking zombie into full-on hallucination. But, somehow the confusion and chaos outside my window, the utter lack of decisiveness on the atmosphere's part, makes sense to me today.
To me, these last days of pregnancy feel awfully similar to the days when my husband and I were trying to conceive. Both of us are constantly obsessed with what is or isn't happening inside my body, wondering if I feel "different" in any way that may indicate some progress, waiting for "it" to finally happen. Meanwhile, those around us are increasingly curious about the state of our intimate affairs, asking if it's happened yet, hovering. It's interesting how sex and birth, two of the most private, intimate acts that exist, somehow become public affairs. Given that, let the public record show that as of today, my due date, there are many changes occurring inside my body, but instead of talking about them or what those changes mean as far as when this baby is going to arrive, I will leave it a mystery. My husband and I created this baby in such a secluded, amazingly intimate and meaningful way and shared a quiet, wonderful moment together before the sun rose one summer morning discovering that we were no longer two, but three. In the same way, the rest of this journey is for us. These are the rare experiences in life that change you, that open up your soul and allow it to fuse to another's in a permanent, magical way. And so, together, we wait.
