Any day now Sometime next month

With my other pregnancies, I was reticent to make predictions about when baby was coming. I told my due date with Tirzah Mae (Christmas Day is a pretty spectacular due date), but always immediately clarified “so we’re expecting the baby to come around the New Year.”

Louis was due July 31, and the last thing I wanted was for people to get “due in July” in their heads and therefore get impatient and start asking me when the baby’s coming too soon. I told everyone I was due at the beginning of August.

Left to themselves, many babies go past the due date. I myself went two weeks past. And that’s just fine. “Late” generally means “not yet ready to face the outside world”.

And I was (and always have been) determined to let my babies choose their birthdays.

But after two babies born prematurely due to severe preeclampsia, and with our maternal-fetal specialist telling us we should expect a recurrence, I gave up on obscuring my due date. After all, it’s not like I’ve ever gotten close enough to the due date to feel pressured.

I haven’t scheduled anything besides doctor’s appointments for two months now, because I expected to go to the hospital for bedrest at any time. For two months now, my fellow Sunday School teachers have been telling me they’re hoping to see me again next week – explicitly or implicitly expressing their hopes that I not have a baby just yet.

And every week for the past two months, I show up to Sunday school or Bible study and see the relief on all my friends’ faces. I’m here. I’m still pregnant. Friends and acquaintances, all of whom have been praying, catch my eye and we share a look of rejoicing, thankful for God’s grace in prolonging this pregnancy.

And then, yesterday, I reached 37 weeks. Term.

The baby can come now, at any time.

Now that we’re term, “stay pregnant” doesn’t apply.

We have. We are. And now the baby can come, whenever he chooses.

After two months of expecting the baby to arrive at any time, of praying the baby won’t, of counting down first to “more pregnant than I’ve ever been” and then to “term”, it’s time to switch gears.

Now that everyone knows it’s only three weeks until that magical “due date”, now that everyone knows we’re term, now it’s time to switch gears.

For months, it’s been “any day now” I expected my health to head south – now I need to adjust to “could be another five weeks”.

Because I still believe it best for baby to choose his own birthday. And I don’t want my excitement over making it to term to rob this little one of his final fetal triumph – that of initiating this amazing process we call “childbirth”.