Feathering the Nest

(A writing excercise on the term "Overdue")

Our nest is ready. We wait. We wait some more for our fourth. I am settling into the tension of being asked perpetually by well-wishers and wanting to be in this sacred space of anticipation. It is hard to be the watched pot. The texts, the emails, the phone calls, the random inquisitions about the progress of my cervix, my effacement, the station of the baby in my canal. The obnoxious comments of, “Wow, you look like you haven’t dropped at all,” loudly called out by a neighbor in a crowded restaurant. I wanted to bop her. It interrupts my rhythm of waiting and my baby’s. I feel like I should be further along in this progress of birth by everyone else’s expectations, but I root myself into my reality and wait.

To be in this present moment I savor my last days of squirmy movements, feet in ribs, butt in upper lung area, head in pelvis. When I roll from one side to the other at night and feel my baby reposition himself to either side fingers grasp at lower hip, feet push off my sides, a head that swirls like the hair that swirls on his head in growth. A sage friend of mine reminded me today that the best gift I could give this child now was to allow him to enter this world on his own time and rhythm. This child is gentle, and harmonious, and beautiful, and grounded, and rooted, and spiritual. And the sooner I honor these gifts and his desire to come on his own terms the better able I will to mother his fullness, his gifts, out of his shy nature into brilliance.

I find myself at times already catapulting my kids from the nest as I sit and write this. I see my mom and how she has aged and dealt with the empty nest and I rally against it. She seems sad…and somehow I inhibit this sadness as I think of the inevitable; missing my present. I am not my mother, nor will I be and what fills my time now will shift but my life will remain full and vibrant. Sage wisdom from an older mom I was told when I had Finn, “That as mothers our jobs are to create memories.” To elaborate on her thought, the only way to do this is to be fully alive in the present.

The more tuned in I am to my own rhythm and allow my children the honor to be in tune with their rhythms the healthier and might I venture happier we all will be and become. Such joy and excitement as we await for our number four!