Our Baby is Five Days Late. Clearly We’re Doing Something Wrong.
Needs More Prostaglandin

Here we are, expectant parents, still running the pregnancy marathon together like those two lion/gazelle things in Animalympics. We’ve crossed the finish line into the no man’s land of where the hell is our baby. I’ve written before about the fanfare surrounding the due date (DD). We get our hopes up, us parents-in-waiting do, and when the DD comes and goes, a little bit of wind goes out of your sails.
Ok, all of the wind goes out of your sails. It’s like Muppet Treasure Island in here. Specifically, the part where they’re stuck without any wind and they start to go crazy. Nothing solves crazy like a little impromptu musical number above decks.
There’s a part of you that hopes, up until about midnight, that at least one contraction will come before the day turns over, so you can say to your child twenty years hence, “Well, you started to show signs of maybe showing up on your due date.”
After the DD passes, you figure the odds are ever-increasing, so the chances are even better that DD+1 will be THE DAY. Your initial despair turns into a sparkling hope, the kind that teenage girls probably get when, despite all evidence to the contrary, their hunky crush smiles at them, maybe.
In our case, DD+1 was entirely uneventful.
As were DD+2 and DD+3.
Scratch that. “Uneventful” isn’t entirely accurate, because we received at least a dozen calls and texts from people wondering if the baby had arrived. The most amusing of all inquiries came from both pairs of expecting grandparents, whose regular check-ins made us think they feared we’d forget to tell them.
I don’t blame them. It’s fun for them, not being pregnant and wondering if you shouldn’t be walking more, having more utilitarian sex, twiddling your nipples more frequently, or swallowing fistfuls of ghost peppers. Those Old Wives had some crazy tales, man!
Meanwhile, we huddle in our post-DD foxhole, wondering when the scarcest sign will give us cause to dance a jig, loosen the mizzenmast, jam the main spikes, cast off the cannons, and point the coxswain towards the magical realm of Saint Joseph’s, where the friendly, medically proficient natives will help us welcome our little bugger into a sterile, quiet, bright, and decidedly chilly world.
A glimmer of hope came yesterday — DD+4 — when my wife experienced some regular Braxton-Hicks contractions. These are “false” contractions, but — for us — they were something. They were regular, they happened all day, and they…stopped. Damn it.
DD+5 has been pretty quiet so far. Is it the calm before the storm?
“Do you think the baby’s dropped?” my wife asks me for the fiftieth time in as many hours.
“Yes, definitely,” I say, having not a clue. I place my hand beneath her belly, trying to gauge if the width of my hand has any less room than it did before. I can’t tell. “Yup, definitely dropped,” I say, wanting to believe it myself.
What does a “dropped” baby look like, anyway? Is it middle-aged-man-beer-belly dropped, like… hanging-over-the-belt-and-sticking-disgustingly-out-of-the-stained-wife-beater dropped? Or is it just a few inches below the other nine months of pregnancy, gee-I-wish-we’d-taken-some-photos dropped? And when does the baby drop? A few days or a few hours before the first contractions? Right before the moment of arrival? As it’s sliding out of the womb? GAAHH!
An amusing side effect of missing a due date by more than a few days is the stream of news that tends to come in. For instance, we found out that all of the other couples in our birthing class gave birth, some of them early.
“Is it weird that I’m jealous that they’re no longer pregnant?” my wife asks.
I give the only conceivably correct answer: “Hell no. You have every right to be jealous. Be as jealous as you want, loves. Those hussies suck.”
Even minor celebrities start giving birth early. You see birds bringing wriggly worms to their hatchlings out of season. The universe laughs.
In a last ditch attempt to check off all of the pre-labor checkboxes, we went out to a nice dinner tonight. It stands to reason that this would speed things along, since a friend of ours and our sister-in-law did the same thing just a day or two before they went into labor. Thus:
Nice dinner + [1, 3] days = labor
You won’t find this equation in any baby book, but it’s a total life hack. I’ll report back in no more than three days to say I told you so.
If nothing else, putting good, hopeful vibes out into the universe should help. And if you ever need an excuse for a nice steak dinner…
There’s another part of me — very small — that isn’t discouraged by the delay. It means more time with my wife, after all, and a few more nights of uninterrupted sleep before the tsunami of diapers. And handful of precious afternoons where I can just…take a walk and not worry if the baby is going to spontaneously self-immolate in my absence.
A few more nights where I have the time and mental acuity to write without falling headfirst into my keyboard.
This is but a small piece of my lifelong daily writing practice (Day 127). If you enjoyed this, you may also like some of my other writing.
