ha ha

If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans.

All the magic spells we've been casting have not enticed this baby to enter the world on anything other than his own time. I am still pregnant.

Today we went to the birth center for a non-stress test and a measurement of the amniotic fluid. All is well, baby is active and in plenty of fluid. He just must be really really comfortable. The good news is that I am dilated 1cm and baby is fully engaged. I walk every day, which seems to bring on lots of Braxton-Hicks, and when I'm not walking I'm squirreling around on the yoga ball which also seems to bring them on.

I've exhausted almost all my "labor projects" -- you know, those time-consuming projects that are supposed to occupy a distracted but not totally miserable laboring lady -- including baking, cleaning, and archiving three years worth of letters from J's grandpa to his grandma during his stint as a merchant marine during WWII. He wrote to her every day. Sometimes twice a day.

Still on my list of things to do: iron all of J's shirts. No kidding. I'll probably get to that tomorrow.

I've been on a roller coaster of fretting and then letting go, ad infinitum. My mind is a hallway of mirrors of mental chatter, ranging from the merely obsessive to the curiously morbid -- why didn't anyone warn me of this trickery? My main objective is to come up with things to do every day, so that I'm not mired in the incredulity of not yet having a baby.

But letting go of expectations is much easier said than done. Or at least, it seems to require being done again and again, as I discover expectations hidden within layers of what I thought was letting go (as in: maybe if I fully let go of my desire to have the baby today, that will trigger my labor to start). I've been trying to bargain with god.

Yesterday my mom and I walked out by the Gliderport near Torrey Pines. We watched people coasting their big U-shaped gliders on updrafts from the ocean, some solo and some with passengers, all agile and graceful. Man imitates bird. We sat and watched a while, because we both wanted to see how they take off and land. We saw a couple of aborted attempts, and then finally one guy just walked to the edge of the bluff and stepped off, his vessel immediately lifted on gusts from below. It caught my breath -- how terrifying and exhilerating it must be to fly, to trust your wings and the air beneath them. How simple it looked.

Later on, I imagined that my letting go has to look like that: stepping away from what I think has to happen, and into the current of what is already there. This is faith.

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