when i wake up tomorrow morning – barring any drastic excitement before then – i will be further along than i have ever been before, more pregnant than my body has ever managed.

i am 36 weeks today, the threshold of what some – few, but some – definitions are willing to call term.  Oscar was born in the wee hours of the morning at 36 weeks, 1 day.  if i’m honest with myself, i feel overdue…a hundred months pregnant, long past the expected point of delivery…not because this baby couldn’t use another month inside, my rational mind cautions, but because this pregnancy has been so tentative and fraught with what-ifs from the beginning that the bar was set low; 24 weeks prayed for, 28 hoped for, 32 seeming bounty beyond all wildest expectations.  i have been on high-alert for months, as ready as i can be, prepared to drop everything and run to the hospital at the least sign of labour.

well, labour came, Wednesday, but not to me…my half-brother and his partner welcomed a daughter, their firstborn.  and i had to give my head a shake and remind myself, severely, that it was her turn, not mine…that i am in no rush.  i am weary, but i am in no rush.  i figure if i keep saying it, i’ll start believing it.

the baby’s name is Bronwyn Elise.  i love it, but i grieved a little hearing it…because if you check the comments on last week’s name post, you’ll see Bronwen was a top choice for us for a middle name.  what are the chances?  Bronwen was what i was almost called, before my father’s objections convinced my mother to go with the cutesy Bonnie instead – oh, my mother laughed yesterday when she heard he was finally stuck with it – and it has long been Dave’s favourite female name.  we couldn’t quite come up with a short form that worked well enough for us to use it as a first name: having a Bon and a Bron in the same house didn’t do much for us, and Wendy, as the name of Dave’s we-shall-never-speak-of-this-again first wife, was out.  but i wanted Bronwen in the mix.  my father remarried another Bonnie when i was less than two.  i’ve shared my name with my stepmother my entire life.  i nearly changed my name to Bronwen when i was in my teens…and in some secret part of me, have always considered it mine.  using it on a daughter would have been, in a way, my only chance to name her in some sense after me, me alone…because my real name has never been mine alone.  now Bronwen, even if we used it, could never be for me alone…it is hers, now, the little eight-pound beauty.  and that same small part of me is sad, wistful.

but it also narrows our choices, which probably will make the overall naming circus easier in the long run. :)

in any case she is here and wonderful and new and so i wander the maternity ward these days cooing at this lovely little niece creature, looking like i’ve swallowed a basketball, like i’m loitering just in case.  i think i make the nurses nervous.  perhaps it’s the licorice cigar and the manic Groucho Marx imitation.

Bon & Bronwyn

if i thought my bambina had a womb with a view, i’d understand her staying safely put.  that look on my face scares me too.