Thirty-Nine Weeks

Read this post on Substack.

We’re not to forty weeks yet, but it feels like time.

Even my maternity shirts aren’t staying down over the bump anymore. At the grocery store, we’re starting to see expiration dates on dairy past the baby’s due date.

By butcher shop metrics, baby is big for a chicken but small for a turkey. It feels like it: a rotisserie strapped to my front. Its sharp little pelvis presses hard above my belly button, nearly all the time. If I push back, the little bones connect and pressure reaches down into the pelvis.

We do the final-prep laundry, throwing in the new muslins, the tiny onesies. I hang them to dry between Robert’s giant socks. Folding them is the first time I feel like three people live here: a pile for each of us. We don’t have room for a nursery, but I make a space on the shelf.

It surprises me how often I still worry if it’s doing okay in there. This is an active fetus, fully formed, and even so — an hour or so of belly quiet switches on my vigilance.

There is a sort of deep grief latent in pregnancy: what if something goes wrong with this unobservable child? We are told, again and again, that the fetus’s best protection is the mother’s intuition. I should notice the patterns of my body, the movements of the unborn…