Waiting for a baby

Waiting, waiting.  There is nothing more happy or hopeful than waiting for a baby.

Two friends, or rather, one friend and one acquaintance, are due this week, so someone is bound to pop any second.

Not much to say, to do, to think, but I feel anxious, fidgety, twiddly of thumbs, waiting and waiting for these two new people.

One of them is a first baby, and I feel overwhelmingly sad, thinking of the week or so while we waited for YM (waiting for YM while he takes his own sweet time seems to be a pattern; at least, it was this evening when he went swimming with a kid from school instead of phoning and telling me he was going swimming).

Thinking, specifically, of one special dinner and a movie night we were planning, at Milk n’ Honey; I don’t remember what the movie was.  Life had been so crazy-hectic:  he was due the first day of Sukkos, and with finishing school and then the yamim tovim and everything, I hadn’t really had any “me” time.

So two days after Sukkos, that was the plan.  Quick post-term ultrasound to make sure he was okay (he was swimmy and busy and happy so I wasn’t worried) and then out for dinner, ice cream, movie, whatever I wanted.

Except instead the ultrasound person said my amniotic fluid was low and it was time to get the baby out.  So Jeremy went home to get the “baby bag” and I stayed in the hospital waiting to have my labour induced; waiting to have my membranes ruptured.

I sat there, looking at the amniotic-slash-crochet hook and watching Jeremy goof around with all the machinery – the ultrasound thingy, the heartrate thingy – no clue how very awful things were about to become.

Labour should have been a clue, I guess.  That was pretty awful, even with the epidural early on.

But instead of the happy “baal teshuva” life we felt we’d been promised – sheitels and tzitzis and gemaras and a baby:  perfect! – our lives began to spiral out of control:  an awful, hellish descent that, on days like today (almost 16 years later), I feel I’m still struggling to climb back up from.

On days like today, I wish I could take it back.  Not entirely:  I just wish I was still waiting, perched on that precipice, happily, hopefully, waiting for a baby.