Mama-luia

"So when are you going to have that baby?" I get asked over and over, really whenever I leave the house. And my temptation is to say "maybe never?" It certainly feels like that. Thankfully I understand best practice well enough that I know my medical team would not allow that to happen. Mere biology wouldn't allow a woman to gestate indefinitely. Yet I found myself texting my godmother yesterday, my due date, that I may very well be the first woman in history to be pregnant forever. I will be a circus sideshow, right next to the bearded lady. The thing of it is, at least when I went overdue with Elijah (by a paltry two days, mind you), I had prodromal labour for two entire weeks leading up to his birth. At least that made it seem like things were happening... or would soon. His was a tidy, quick labour and even relatively easy given how big he was at birth. This time, I have no indication that I will ever deliver this baby. My body has taken no interest...

This is the fifth time I will be pregnant during the holy season of Lent, yet the first time I will deliver my child before Easter arrives. I was recently struck by the significance of this in a circuitous way. Patrick mentioned while we were prepping breakfast for our family that “it didn’t really feel like Lent.” Immediately I assumed, wrongly, that he castigating me for having taken on no penances at all, and in my sensitive state, I nearly burst into tears right then. I'm fragile these days, what can I say? Seeing my face, he quickly corrected himself and said he meant he was thinking of his own Lenten sacrifices. Instead, he suggested, I was let off the hook, so to speak, for this year. That comment didn’t sit well with me, though. For someone who has a serious temptation to laxity and sloth, being patted on the head and promised the freedom to an even greater state of apathy seemed just plain wrong. But is that why the Church absolves pregnant women from the obl...

In just a short matter of weeks, our family will welcome a new member. I am absolutely in awe, but to some degree, in a bit of disbelief. Of course I have a round belly, and nightly sessions of kicks and flutters, to remind me that a real live human is growing inside me. But the reality that our life as a family of six will forever be changed, that a unrepeatable human is about to take centre stage and be ooohed and ahhed over by all who meet him or her, it's mystifying to me, really. This pregnancy has not been as hard as some of the others. For one, my morning sickness ended more swiftly and never reached the fevered-pitch it did with some of my children. I have had short bouts of swollen ankles and feet, but because this is my wintry-est due date, I think I've been spared the excess of that. When I was pregnant with Anna, who was born in October, August and September were just brutal for this affliction. I don't cope well with hot weather, even when I am not being i...