soon

vigil, originally uploaded by theloushe.

It is hard to wait. So hard to wait. It's hard to know that any day this new person will be here, that today he or she may be here.

This is my third time around as an auntie and yet somehow harder to sit on my hands than the first two. I keep tapping my well of empathy, reminding myself what it felt like to be "overdue" and receiving daily phone calls from people who wanted to know if there were any news. How it felt to run the gauntlet of the daily preschool pickup while people asked again if I'd had "that baby" yet. (Obviously not, folks.) How at 41 weeks and change I wanted to go into hiding. I tap into that and resist the urge to ask nosy questions, try to remember what felt most loving from friends and family at that point, and know inside that the most impatient person of all is the dear mama. She needs our patience to bolster hers. Soon the babe will be here, no matter how slowly the minutes go by right now.