- Will the bathroom be finally, completely finished after a bit of light caulking?
- Will I get a ballpark date for the nursery painting?
- Will we be able to set up the crib and deck the walls, hang the curtains/fun stuff in the next 2-3 weeks?
- Most importantly, what will we learn at Wednesday's appointment? Will all my talk of C-sections and accepting my "complications" have the intended opposite effect when it turns out the placenta has moved and the baby has turned? (ha! wouldn't that be nice...)
After what feels like two weeks of just waiting around things are finally picking up speed. I'm pretty sure I have midterms this week, too, but thank goodness summer classes are a bit more relaxed than core courses, even if I have two massive projects due in 5 weeks that I haven't even looked at yet.
Oh yeah, and there's my birthday. 28. That just feels like a regular number to me and I think that's a good thing. It will be the best birthday in what amounts to two years of fairly crappy birthdays for various reasons, mostly having to do with the emotional ups and downs of trying and failing to conceive and then being incapacitated for an entire summer due to several medical procedures and an undiagnosed infection that nearly killed me. You know the story.
Life after my 26th celebration was fraught with heartache but things improved drastically by the second half of 27. 27 felt like I had traveled at warp speed through a worm hold and suddenly found myself in the galaxy called "adulthood." It was as jolting and sudden a transition as could be, as if a part of my former self had gotten spliced in the process and I had to figure out who I was all over again. My friends gave me the space I needed while my ever-supportive husband and family helped me negotiate this new territory and this new identity on the other side. I have changed and I am changing still but I have to believe it has made me stronger. I am Sarah 2.0 and the new appreciation for my life and the tiny life I will soon bring into this world comes at a cost: I know things now that I cannot unknow about myself, about human nature and about the precarious line between trusting your gut and putting all your trust in medical professionals. I have so much more respect for basic biological processes and for my own body, though it was absolutely a confederation of experts and good fortune that gave me the most precious gift of all.
I know, I know...writers get all sentimental and reflective around their birthdays but I haven't really thought so much about my special day as I have thought about what significance the actual day of birth holds, in a general cosmic sense. Obviously I've been thinking about birth. A lot. Aside from the truly hilarious "15-minute Cesarian Clinic" dream I had two nights ago where you roll up to a counter that resembles and old-school bank teller's window and sign in for your procedure before being wheeled out with your baby within the hour, I have thought seriously about dates and choice v. chance. If we are asked to choose a C-section date, how late can we wait? What day of the week is best? Does it really matter if she's born under Virgo or Libra?
I'm reminded of the old English nursery rhyme:
Mondays child is fair of face,
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
Obviously, if I had to choose a day for my daughter's birth it would be a Thursday for no good reason other than it feels cozy and optimistic. Rhett, however, was born on a Monday and he certainly is as "fair of face" as he is judicious of character. Monday gets an unfair reputation because of its association with the end of something fun and the return to something decidedly not fun. I wouldn't mind a Monday, though. Clearly the poem is skewed towards happy, Christian God-abiding babies born on Sundays but I think Sunday would be my absolute last pick for a scheduled birth because hello? Who wants to work L&D on the final day of the weekend?
As for astrological signs, we've got two Leos in the house and a dog who is a Gemini (no shortage of personalities here!) so the addition of an analytical Virgo or a social Libra should be interesting. Most likely, she'll be born after the September 22 cusp, making her a Libra. If she does make her entrance in September, she'll have the best birthstone ever: Sapphire. Not that I'm biased or anything in my love of the stone...
Do our birthdays really have any sway over our personalities? Who can say for sure? I do enjoy looking for signs of accuracy in birth prophesies, retrospectively, though divining astrology is about as accurate as reading tea leaves to predict the future. It is wildly entertaining, though.