Still pregnant.

The wattage of my “glow” is significantly diminished.
Sean keeps telling me I look beautiful. He just recognizes the warning signs of a pregnant woman at the end of her swollen, achy, harassed rope. High probability of head biting off, venomous barbs being spat, or hysterical tears. I think I am actually holding together pretty well, but must say that it is pretty remarkable how quickly one runs out of civil responses for the following scenario:

~~brring, brring, brri~~

“Hello?”

“Oh hi. I didn’t think you’d be there. How are you? Any baby yet?”

Yesterday as we walked the streets of downtown Glens Falls trying to coax the baby out women would look at me and say, “Oh, congratulations. I remember those days. How wonderful. When are you due?”

Saccharine smile, “Oh thank you. Actually I’m just a bit overdue.”

“Ohhhh.”

When I was on the phone with the midwife Thursday, the day my doctor said we’d go ahead and break my water, she said, “Why don’t you make an appointment for sometime next week? We’ll talk then.”

“But, Dr. Guido said…”

“Oh, you’re just having so much trouble being patient aren’t you? It’s just so hard.”

Ok, that may be true, but c’mon, isn’t it her job to sort of humor us hormonal, uncomfortable, helpless pregnant women?

I know, it’s all just whining, but when you venture into a pregnancy you have an understanding of it being a 40 week contract, with the potential for an early dismissal. Then to have someone say, just days shy of your finish line, “Looks like you’ve just got’a couple of hours,” you rejoice. So understand that each hour beyond the utterance of those words, and each minute beyond the 40 week mark suddenly enters some sort of otherworldly time vortex of pain wherein moments stretch to unendurable measures of time, days become weeks. The agony is further heightened by the ringing phone and chiming doorbell.

After all this I get to thinking about the life inside of me and get guilty. It needs the extra time. I want a healthy baby, right?

Miserable.

Please just let me have the baby. Let it be healthy.