(Diary) Week 40: Ask the Baby
Stop asking me.
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.
Dear friend,
Jen Glantz here. Yes, I am still pregnant. It’s the number one thing people ask me, these days. Friends I haven’t spoken to in years, people on social media, my own parents.
They call, they text, they slide into my DMs and ask me: no baby?
And when I say: no baby.
They write back: well, when is it coming?
And I just want to say: NOBODY KNOWS, JOE!
But instead, I serve them this 🤷♀️ emoji, and toss my phone to the other side of the bed.
My doctor told me there’s no reason to stress about this. Some babies come early. Some don’t. It does not mean there’s something wrong with you or the baby.
It also doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the people in my life.
I know that. They are excited! But their excitement is starting to stress.me.out.
So I’m going to try to spend less time with my phone attached to me this week and more time cruising around my apartment and reminding this baby to come out when she’s ready and not when 100,000 social media followers and newsletter subscribers hoped she would.
Ps. Know someone who would enjoy reading this?
Some quick things I loved this week:
❤️ Remembering some of the best advice I was given during pregnancy. When I was stressing about all the baby stuff I needed to buy, a friend told me to make the process easier. She said go on Amazon, search top-rated products and buy the best-selling item in each category. Some items, like a diaper pail or towels for the baby, don’t need hours of research and shouldn’t give you a headache.
I’m not taking a maternity leave because I don’t get one. As a solopreneur, it’s not something I planned for. I don’t feel guilty about that. I do feel stressed. A friend sent me this article and I really love it.
❤️ Products that I fell in love with this week:
-I put together a list of items that helped me get through pregnancy. Here are general items and here’s a list of the maternity clothing I bought - that I actually loved and wore.
-We finally set up the baby’s mini crib this weekend (video here) from Nestig. I picked this one because it’s a 3-in-1 crib, so when the baby grows, the crib expands into a full-size crib and a toddler bed. I honestly thought there would never be a crib in this world that would fit inside our 550 square foot apartment, but this one fits in the corner of our room so perfectly.
-I’ve never taken vitamins in my life before getting pregnant and then I started taking these prenatals. They are vegan and I love them. I’ll miss them. If you have any good postnatal vegan vitamins you recommend, let me know!
**I made a bunch of detailed lists of all the things I bought for pregnancy, postpartum, and for the baby. Here’s where you can eyeball / share these lists with anyone who needs them**
❤️I wrote an article for Insider all about how I didn’t spend a lot of money on maternity clothes. Read it here.
❤️I’ve been spending time spilling my thoughts on TikTok. Watch some of that fun stuff right here!
Go Ahead, Ask the Baby. Stop Asking Me.
Every Monday, I tell myself that this the Monday I’m going to mix up magic potions and walk thousands of steps and eat all the spicy things in my house to try to get the baby to come out.
But every Monday, I freak out.
I’ll start this stuff next week. But then next week turns into week 38, then 39, now 40.
I crawled into my doctor’s appointment last week with my head down. I felt ashamed.
I’m still pregnant. I confessed to her, like she didn’t already know. I’m sorry the baby hasn’t come yet.
The thing about good OB/GYNs is that they’ve heard it all, they’ve seen it all, and they know exactly the gobbledygook kind of stuff that goes through a pregnant women’s brain when the hormones are jiving and the emotions are showing their teeth.
Why are we stressing? She simply said. There’s no reason. You’re not even 40 weeks yet. The baby has time. The baby will come out when the baby wants to come out.
But what about the people on social media telling me it’s go-time? What about my parents who bet the baby was going to come out in mid-February? What about my friends who are calling and texting and wondering if I’m not answering because I’m in labor?
WHAT ABOUT THEM?
Everyone in your life is always going to pressure you to do something, be something, rush something. They don’t always mean to. But they do. I wish someone told me to get better at learning how to ignore people.
So I think this is the week I will do all the magic potions. But only if I feel ready to try some things to perhaps kickstart labor. If I don’t, I won’t. This baby will come, soon, eventually.
I’m not predicting a due date. I’m not going to feel pressure when her due date passes.
I’m going to enjoy my last few moments of being pregnant, of our secret love language kicks, of having to pee every five seconds and knowing that I have to pee every five seconds because she’s moving lower and lower in my body. I’m going to enjoy deep cleaning my house because nesting is a funny part of pregnancy. And I’m going to enjoy these moments when I thought being a mom was the most impossible and scary thing in the world, because it probably will be, for a little bit, but it will be so many other things too, for a lot longer, I suppose.
I hope to be in your inbox again next week. If I’m not, it will be obvious why. But I promise to be in there again soon, when I figure out how to be a brand new mom, and get a free couple of minutes, and a free hand, to write to you.
Until then, I love you, I mean it, I’ll let you know when she’s here, I promise you that.
