(Diary) Week 34: When's Your Due Date?

Who cares.

Welcome to my diary. These are entires I wrote during my own pregnancy. What you’re about to read is unfiltered, unedited, and perhaps a bit uncanny. But these are my raw feelings written in real-time. Everyone’s perspective and journey is different. This is mine.

Everyone asks you for your due date, as if that means something.

But it doesn’t.

You could have this baby any second.

Wait, what was that sharp pain in your lower pelvic region?

Okay, never mind, it’s gone.

But you tell them March 8th and they tell you:

Oh, wow, you still have so much time.

Time? You snap back. Who the hell has time?

You say it like it’s all gone, like it’s something you lost in a war.

But really you say it like it’s something you know you’ve wasted when you didn’t realize how much of it you had.

You’ve had 34 weeks to prepare for a baby. You spent 30 weeks acting like a baby prepares for themselves.

You spent 2 weeks panic buying everything anyone told you needed on Amazon. Baby oil, nipple pads, butt paste, sitz baths.

You spent the other 2 weeks trying to live your damn life. Night clubs until 2am, taking shots of lemon water during Thursday happy hours, almost booking trips to Islands you couldn’t afford a one-night stay at.

And now you’re here, about to have a baby, and even if everyone tries to tell you that you still have time, you know that you don’t.

You know that Annie down the street had her baby at week 34 and a friend of a friend’s second cousin’s coworker had her baby at week 34 and your best friend tells you, for the first time-ever, that she JUST REMEMBERED her mom had her at 34 weeks.

You miss the days you thought due dates were permanent, non-refundable, all-hands calendar meetings that happened, no matter what.

But all a due date means is that a baby has spent 266 growing inside of you. Even then, it still might not want to come out. Even before, it might say it’s ready for the world, perhaps even if you’re not ready for it yet.

Okay but what would you rather? Your friend asks you after she saw you roll your eyes at someone who asked you about your due date. Would you rather know the exact day the baby will come out or would you rather it be random?

You think of all the things you have survived in your life.

The moment you lost your full-time job and had no income waiting for you on the way out.

The moment someone you loved broke up with you.

The moment you found out a person you loved was in extreme, life-changing, trouble.

The moment you learned someone you loved had died.

All of those happened and you weren’t prepared. You couldn’t have been.

And yet, you survived.

Battle wounds fade. Memories get foggy. The toughest things you go through become forgettable over time.

So now, you are 34 weeks pregnant and when someone asks you when you’re due, you have promised to say:

Any moment now.

And if so, you exhale, I will be ready for it.