Is It Rolling, Bob?
The two months before a baby is born are kind of a cruel test for the parents involved. This is how they have gone for me so far. At 32 weeks (in a world in which 40 weeks is considered full-term for a pregnancy), I have my first panicked thoughts: "Nothing's ready and the baby will be here in only two months!" I lose maybe one night of sleep and a week's worth of fingernail growth before successfully pushing the thoughts aside to continue on. At about 35 weeks, the worries in my head start to grow teeth and I am no longer able to suppress them. I run around like a madman trying to get everything done: buy furniture, put furniture together, install car seat, prepare website, study childbirth literature, conduct final talks with birth attendents, wrap things up at work in case of sudden departure, etc. By about 38 weeks, I'm ready (thank you, children, for not coming dramatically early, so far).
Which brings us to now, inching toward 40 weeks and little unsure of what to do with ourselves. Conventional advice, which we need surprisingly little of around here lately, says to "Relax!" and "Enjoy your last days together before the baby is born and your lives change forever!" (yes, all child-related advice is enthusiastically followed by an exclamation point). Since this is not as easy as it sounds, especially when it's not your first child, what you end up with is two people trying desperately to distract themselves while half-maintaining the intensity and preparedness to drop everything at a moment's notice and go through a labor and delivery that will totally earn a gold star from the midwives. And then you have the early contractions, which provide a test run of the whole procedure, but namely of Dinka's uterus and my digestive tract.
I count to thirty a lot these days—for my Workrave-prompted micro-breaks, my five-times-daily hand/wrist/arm stretches prescribed by my doctor, my nightly running stretches, etc. This can be a maddening exercise when I'm impatiently trying to get back to something but it's forced me to accept the value of taking a deep breath, relaxing my shoulders, and quieting all the nagging voices in my head, if only for thirty seconds. So that sound that you're hearing now is me exhaling a deep breath and closing my eyes. I'm not even counting. Thirty will arrive, all I need to do is quiet my mind and wait.
(For those of you not currently listening to Nashville Skyline, the title is from Dylan's comment to producer Bob Johnston at the beginning of "To Be Alone with You.")