“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the midwife, walking into my appointment.
It was the welcome that I had been waiting for – among other things. After my gray knitted-brow of uncertainty about my plan to deliver my baby halfway across the country, the drama of getting out of Washington, D.C., the list-making needed to get my family to Omaha, we were all here.
There was nothing to do but wait. And there are few collections of days that feel at once as momentous and mundane as waiting for a baby.
I trundled into the midwives’ office in Omaha as rain poured down on the ill-fitting slicker that stopped zipping around my belly long ago. The appointment was a wash of comfort. The midwife could have been a friend of my mom’s, one with 20 years of experience delivering babies. She asked about my trip and had me tell her how my husband and I met. We spoke seriously about my labor plan. We laughed about how many people think midwives just birth babies at home. (“Which in Nebraska is a class IV felony!” she hooted. “It’s just birthing a baby!”). She gave me a hug and I nearly cried with relief.
The rest of the week, nothing happened. Just as it was supposed to. My sons raked leaves with my dad and jumped into them. They read books with my mom. My husband worked remotely in the basement. And I, well, honestly, I slept.
We were all just waiting.
Today, to give my constantly caregiving parents a break, my husband and I took the boys to a nature preserve along the Missouri River to participate in a trash cleanup. We joined a Boy Scout troop, some college students and a few other families with trash bags and work gloves as we wandered the trails along the flood plain collecting tin cans and candy wrappers. It was a sort of prebirth mitzvah – and one that my husband and I figured might have the added benefit of stimulating labor.
It was such a beautiful day we stayed on the preserve after the cleanup, hiking up and down the bluffs along the river for hours. The boys raced the trails, running ahead to their dad, then back to check on me, calling back and forth to each other, laughing, hiding, chasing.
I stopped for a moment on the trail, looking up at a brilliant yellow cottonwood tree. Every leaf was turned out in gold, but still clinging to the tree. I realized today was peak foliage. All around us the trees were on fire with orange and red as we walked among them. It was that last gasp – so fleeting — right before the leaves fall and the season changes.
I felt suddenly that I was at peak foliage with my sons, too. Maybe the walk was doing its work on me, but I tumbled into a feeling I recalled from the final days of my second pregnancy – a sort of bittersweet fullness right before birth. There was a mourning I felt for the end of the singular relationship with my older son before my second was born. And today, as we hiked the rolling bluffs along the Missouri River, I felt palpably a rich sadness about the end of us as a family of four.
A glorious melancholy, to be sure, since we are delighted to have another child in our family. But today was a last sweetness with my two sons. Before I have to divide my time among them even further. Before their relationship is altered by a sibling. Before they become the family of five they will always identify with instead of this fleeting version that is all that they’ve known. And I’m so happy I had the time and space to walk in the sunshine with them today.
Because, even as I write this, I’m getting tunnel vision. My contractions are getting stronger. Still far apart. But getting more intense. They are powerful enough to remind me of what I should have been doing while I was waiting. I have to get a load of laundry in the washer and pack a suitcase. The season of our lives is about to change. The leaves are falling.
Anna Bahney is a writer based in Washington, D.C. She has been on staff at The New York Times, USA Today and Columbia Journalism Review, and now writes a column on the personal finance of parenting for Forbes.com. Follow her at www.annabahney.com or on Twitter: @annabahney. Her diary of her travels to her childhood home in the Midwest to deliver her third child will be chronicled here weekly through October.