Dear Baby,

For a long time your daddy and I have called you "the bean." But that doesn't seem appropriate anymore given that you are as big as a watermelon now, or whatever fruit "What to Expect When You're Expecting" would compare you to at 38 weeks. I think it's a little strange to compare babies to fruit, given that babies are much sweeter than any fruit could ever be. But I digress.

I've waited a long time for you. I've always wanted to have children, but I've always wanted to do it with the right person. And for some people, the right person doesn't come along in high school, in college, in graduate school or even in the workplace. As a single person, someone actively dating in their 30s, everyone will tell you, "You'll know it when you find it." And for a long time, I didn't believe them. As you'll discover from having me as your mother, I can overthink things. Make them too complicated. Doubt that good things will come to me or that even if they do, somehow it will fall apart. The other shoe will drop and I will be alone again.

But when I met your daddy, it wasn't complicated. I liked him from the first moment I saw him. I liked talking to him. I liked that he listened to me with an intensity I'd never really felt before, something we now jokingly refer to as his "ministry of presence." He called when he said he would. He picked interesting things for us to do together. And best of all, he never used emoticons or LOL in his emails.

Sure, I had the early dating jitters during our first few months together, but I didn't pick him apart like I had with previous boyfriends. I didn't think, "Well, he's successful but bald" or "he's funny but he competes with me." You see, you get a lot of bad advice about dating and one of them is "relationships are work." Another is "nobody's perfect." So often I stayed in relationships when I had conflicted feelings because I thought I was doing "the work." I thought I had to settle because "nobody's perfect." And neither am I, so who did I think I was being so picky?

The good news is I never married any of these people. Or had a baby with them. Something inside me held back. That was hard to do, given that one friend after another got married, even my younger brother (your Uncle Eric), who seemed much more resistant to adulthood and "settling down" than I ever was. Then they all started having babies. Even Uncle Eric and Aunt Sonnet.

I'll never forget when they called to tell me they were pregnant with your cousin, Helix, six years ago. It was St. Patrick's Day. I was at a bar in Chicago with my then-boyfriend and his friends. It was cold outside and I had gone into the vestibule — the space between the outer and inner doors of the bar — to take the call so that I could hear them above the din of the green beer drinking and celebrating. When they told me I felt sick to my stomach. I pressed my face against the cool glass of the outer door. Things weren't going well with the then-boyfriend. We would have to break up soon and I would have to start over. Meanwhile, your Uncle Eric and Aunt Sonnet were getting something that I badly wanted. And it wasn't fair.

As I got closer and closer to my late 30s, I often thought about what I would do if I never found the right person by the time I was 40. I felt angry at the biological clock. I didn't think it was fair to put that kind of pressure on finding love within a certain time frame. I didn't want to adopt, or get a sperm donor. I had no interest in being a single mom. Being a parent is something I wanted to share with someone — the right someone. So I began to resign myself to thinking I'd just be the world's greatest aunt to Helix, and your newest cousin, Arya.

Another thing you'll discover about having me for your mother is that I'm not the most patient person. It's hard for me to not know what's going to happen, how things will turn out. I often want to control the circumstances, dictate the outcome. I want to prepare myself for heartache or disappointment before it even happens so that I won't be blindsided. But that's silly. Understandable, but silly. Life doesn't work that way. And having those kind of defenses doesn't really protect you anyway. You still get hurt, only longer, because you've spent so much time dreading it, then thinking "I knew this would happen."

But here's some more good news: somehow I was brave enough to just keep going. To stay open to the possibilities, despite attacks of doubt, loneliness and jealousy. And now you're here — just under the deadline. I mean, you're not here, here, but you will be within the next few weeks and I cannot tell you how excited I am to meet you, to hold you, to feed you and to play with you. I probably won't even mind changing your diaper.

I'll do everything I can to be your perfectly imperfect mother. Just like I'm a perfectly imperfect wife to your daddy. We'll all walk through this together (okay, crawl first, but you know what I mean). Because you, dear baby, are someone I will never take for granted.

Love,
Mommy

Good ol' Braxton Hicks

I always thought that the third trimester of pregnancy would be a lot like being an inflatable airbed. Your soft baby belly would just keep getting bigger and bigger until you were about to pop. Then just in time, you'd wake up one night with contractions or your water broken and you'd know, "This is it." You'd roll over, gently wake your husband and off you'd go into labor.

Not so much with me. This pregnancy has been so full of fun surprises (leg cramps, shortness of breath, peeing while sneezing) that I guess I shouldn't expect these last few weeks to be any different. Before we embarked on this journey, neither Dave nor I had ever heard of such things as the mucus plug or perineal massage (yet another reason to keep your kitchen well-stocked with olive oil). And before our childbirth classes I thought the "Ring of Fire" was a Johnny Cash song, not the burning sensation you feel down there when your baby is crowning.

I'm still trying to get my head around effacement. Dilation sounds simple enough: your cervix opens centimeter by centimeter during labor until the opening is large enough for the baby's head to fit through and you can start pushing. Effacement is the shortening of the cervix. It starts happening before dilation (I think) whereby the contractions start pulling up the tissues at the base of your cervix, making the cervix thinner and thinner so it can start opening (dilating). This, appropriately enough, is called "ripening."

At my check-up last week, the midwife said I was already 75% effaced and 1 centimeter dilated. The baby's head was "engaged" and she could feel it right there, at the base of my cervix. It didn't mean I was going into labor tomorrow, she said, because apparently some women walk around being 4 centimeters dilated for weeks before giving birth (nature can be cruel). But it meant my body was definitely getting ready.

John Braxton Hicks

That made sense to me, given that I've been having contractions for weeks. This too, can be "normal" in the third trimester, as the uterus "practices" for the main event. They're called Braxton Hicks contractions, named after a man of course, an English doctor who noticed in 1872 that many women felt contractions in the later stages of pregnancy without going into actual labor.

The thing about Braxton Hicks contractions, however, is that they are supposed to cause only "mild discomfort." They aren't painful like actual labor, according to everything I've read on my iPhone at 2 a.m. when one of them has woken me out of a dead sleep, freaking me out with the sensation of my belly seizing up from the bottom of my rib cage to the base of my pelvis.

Some women don't even notice them. But not me. Oh no, I'm one of the lucky ones who gets the sensation multiple times a day that my mid-region has turned into a snare drum, my abdominal muscles torqued over my already compromised major organs with an intensity that feels a whole lot stronger than "mild discomfort."

A few weeks ago they got so intense that I was convinced I was going into preterm labor. I agonized that I wouldn't get the chance to wear the gorgeous blue maternity dress I'd bought for my baby showers and Dave's graduation (because in the end, it's all about fashion). A frantic call to my midwife confirmed that until the contractions grow continuously stronger and fall into a rhythmic pattern, it's nothing more than an unnerving dress rehearsal.

With less than three weeks to go now and the baby showers and Dave's graduation safely behind us, my job is to stay as hydrated as possible. Hydration is supposed to ease "false labor," so I've been drinking glass after glass of refreshing water. The byproduct, of course, is multiple trips to the bathroom per hour. This slow (and annoying) build up to actual labor, I might add, is nothing I've ever seen featured in movies. Guess it's not as dramatic as gushing water and a mad dash to the hospital. 

One day soon, one of these contractions is going to mean we're actually going to meet our baby. When that happens, a thousand mothers have told me, all of this "mild discomfort" will become a distant memory. I'm not so sure. But I am willing to concede that it will probably be worth it.