No Woman’s Land
Your estimated due date has passed (emphasis on ESTIMATED because for some reason everyone keeps thinking of this as some sort of deadline that your body and baby ought to be aware of…) and you are waiting.
Waiting, patiently at first perhaps. Booking some lovely treats like reflexology or a pregnancy massage, taking some extra time to rest and prepare for your imminent arrival.
Then the waiting starts to get boring, and not just boring but… anticlimactic and frustrating. You’ve spent months gearing yourself up for a birth that isn’t materialising. Maybe you will be pregnant forever, or will you be one of those urban myths that’s pregnant for 44 weeks?!
You are stuck in a holding pattern, a period of suspension, you’re neither here nor there.
But I wonder, assuming your baby is moving as is normal for them, and you feel well, when did we get so impatient? This period of waiting is a waypoint on your journey to becoming a parent. It will test your need to control situations. In the same way your baby (who will turn into a child, who will turn into an adult) can’t be controlled, managed or manipulated like a machine, neither can your body. Let go of the need to control things (and people) that are not in your control.
I wonder if our culture of immediacy, control and convenience have so deeply infiltrated our way of being that we can’t afford our babies the time to fully mature and get themselves ready for the outside world.
There is of course, the external pressure. From friends and relatives as well as medical care givers. This is why it’s important to:
1) not to advertise your EDD to all and sundry, if they insist, give them a time period of a few weeks.
2) know yourself, your body and your baby - that way any time something is ‘off’ you will feel it.
3) understand the way the maternity system and it’s policies work and why, that way if you need to decline their recommendations (which don’t really sound like recommendations or offers, do they? They sound like orders that you are ‘defying’ or ‘refusing’) you can do so confidently and without feeling like you are endangering yourself or your baby
There are plenty of solid reasons that you might want to control the time of your birth either via c-section or induction. But your baby simply going past the ‘deadline’ isn’t one of them.
This blog post isn’t to debate the merits of induction or c-section versus waiting.
It is to question, with curiosity, not confrontation, as to why the waiting is so hard for us as prospective parents and what happened to allowing our babies to come in their own time?
