Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part lll

I thought I’d find one or two kindred spirits on the views expressed in my previous three posts, but on the basis of experience to date, I’ll be surprised if I find anyone alongside me on this one. This is, I think, my unique wonderfully weird moment in parenthood.

My three babies were all late. Gloriously late. Frustratingly late for everyone else, but gloriously late for me. Each one was, give or take, two weeks late, born around the 42 week mark. And here’s the weird bit. I LOVED those last two weeks.

I was lucky. At that stage of pregnancy, life can be uncomfortable for many women. If that’s you, then I have to tell you, it’s because your abdominal muscles are too tight. Don’t worry: you’ll reap your rewards in the years to come. Decades to come. Women like me, with abdominal muscles the slackness of a lettuce leaf (and I’m talking lollo rosso, not iceberg), let the baby hang out in front , and our internal organs have their usual space and go about their usual business uncompromised. I never had heartburn, I had a huge appetite, I never had to get up in the night to wee, I slept like a proverbial baby (and I was soon to find out how proverbial that baby was). I felt full of health, and surprisingly energetic. It seemed like a reward for the miserable early weeks of nausea and fatigue. I did have to counter comments such as ‘you are HUGE, oh my goodness, look at the SIZE of your BUMP, are they sure it’s not twins?”, which under other circumstances might have been a little upsetting, but in late pregnancy, a happy hormone is released in huge measure into my body, which turns me into a cow-like creature. I could serenely chew the cud all day long, watching the world go by, and crowds of onlookers could hold placards and chant slogans about the size of my bump, without me really noticing them at all.

During those two weeks, I would roll my eyes appropriately in response to the ubiquitous question “are you still here?”, and accept people’s kindly-offered sympathy. But inside, I would be hugging to myself my delicious little secret: this was the best bit of all. Being pregnant isn’t a picnic, but there is a loveliness to it, and to me, labour would inevitably mean loss as well as gain. I loved those kicks and squirms, the hidden relationship with my baby, the moments spent wondering whether it was a boy or girl, what he or she would look like, how much it could hear of my voice, the traffic, the radio. The complete and perfect ownership of a priceless treasure, which, once out in the world, would never belong solely to me ever again. I think this is why we never settled on a name before our babies were born. Somehow naming them was giving them a public identity. Until birth, they were all just mine.

Another factor in my contentment during those final two weeks, was that I loved my body. I loved my huge, huge bump. I would wallow in the bath, waddle along the street, sink irrecoverably into sofas, rejoicing in my whale-like being, and loving nothing better than to run my hand over the stretched, soft skin of my bump. For all of our lives, as women, we feel so inadequate for not having the perfect body. Along comes pregnancy, and, for me, the realization each time that my body is a marvelous thing, feeding and nurturing another human life, keeping it safe, giving it all it needs. In pregnancy, as never before or since, my body feels to me purposeful, beautiful, sufficient, perfect. I feel so sad for new mothers these days, all so obsessed with losing baby weight, getting their bodies back to how they were. Is no time of a woman’s life safe from the grinding competition and pressure for a toned body?

But back to me. Picture me, if you will, huge and happy, fending off any doctor’s attempt to induce labour, each day wondering “is this the day?” and toying with the date in my mind. Would this be a nice birthday to have, for life? I'd see the changing mat on the chest of drawers, all ready for the tiny bottom and tiny indignant cries. I'd touch the waiting baby clothes, clean, sweet-smelling, and impossibly small. I'd shut my eyes and try to remember that delicious eau de newborn, and know that it didn’t matter at all how impossible that memory is to recreate, because it wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, more than a few days until I had a soft head to bury my nose in for real. I like anticipation. I think I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day.
Perhaps that’s it. The last gasp of pregnancy is the ultimate in anticipation.

I expect it was all my doing. Midwives say that both baby and mother have to be ready, and maybe my babies were in there, head down, champing gummily at the bit, and it was me resisting the trigger of labour. Midwives know that women can do that kind of thing. I told them it was genetic, that my mother’s babies had all been late, but that was something of an exaggeration. She had one 42-weeker out of four; the rest of us were a respectable 2 or 3 days late. All I know is that I have never met anyone else who has actually hoped for a late baby, and I just can’t understand why. Anyone out there?