From the minute you take that first pregnancy test and realize you have a baby on the way, you start that daily countdown till the moment you can expect to meet your new son or daughter. We are given a specific date of when we predict this baby to make it’s arrival, and although an estimate at best, predicted by our ovulation cycle, cycle length and the date of our last period; we take this as a due date. A date by which we can expect them to have made their grand arrival, and a day after which we class them as late, overdue, ‘being too comfortable’, or simply keeping Mom waiting.
Having been a massive 14 days overdue with my first child, I can totally relate to the wide range of emotions you go through as a Mom to be when your due date enters the past tense. Here are the 10 most common reactions from a Mom to be when your baby is overdue.
1. Throw your toys out of the stroller (literally). When you circled that date in your diary and told your nearest and dearest when your baby would arrive, you fully expected to be able to check it off, complete it as a job well done, and start enjoying your maternity leave with your newly created family of three. As someone who is NEVER late for anything, this shoddy time keeping is incredibly frustrating, and even more so when another Mom from your parenting group who isn’t due for another week has already given birth! IT’S NOT FAIR!!!
2. Wanting to turn off your phone. By far the most annoying part of being overdue, is that your entire contact list of your phone feel the need to message you every single day without fail to ask ridiculous questions like “any sign?” “is she here yet?” or “still pregnant?”. On the first day these messages of support and well wishes are welcome, but by day 3 you feel ready to punch the next person who asks you, and revert to either a) turning off your phone or b) sending round robin messages every day to everyone simply saying two words and two words only. “No news”.
When your frustrations start to show, you can fully expect to hear every lame attempt at making you feel better including “Ah she’s obviously so comfortable where she is”, “use the time to get some sleep” or “she will come when she’s ready.” Meh. You just want to hold your baby already!!
3. Once your due date has passed, you will start to over-analyze every tiny twinge, with every slight tweak or pain being met with a crowd of excited (or terrified!) faces and exclamations of “Ooooh is it time!?.” You can pretty much guarantee that the one time where it actually IS time, it will be the time you are quite settled doing something you’ve been looking forward to all day, such as watching your favorite TV show or drifting off into a much needed sleep.
4. Once you are overdue, you will spend a large proportion of every day checking your underwear, desperately seeking any sign of this baby’s impending arrival. Bizarrely, you’ll find yourself tutting when your panties are clean, only to go and check again 30 minutes later.
5. Having heard that exercise is a natural way to induce labor, you will find yourself walking more steps during these overdue baby days than you have done for the entire last week combined. You become angry when you’ve clocked up 10,000 steps in a day but your baby is still firmly staying put. Revert back to feeling number 1 above.
6. You convince yourself that walking around on all fours and rocking backwards and forwards will help. Spend an entire day in the lotus position only to end up rolling around on the floor like a distressed overturned beetle. Be thankful that your partner was too busy watching TV to take a photograph. The less evidence of that moment the better.
7. Bounce. Spend an entire episode of your favorite TV show bouncing around on your birthing ball to the point where you feel slightly dizzy. Lie in bed with a slight feeling of motion sickness as a result.
8. Eat pineapple by the bucket load before learning that the quantities required for this to actually work at bringing on labor are pretty excessive, and that even you couldn’t consume an entire pineapple in one sitting.
9. Have the hottest spiciest curry you can muster before realizing that the only affect it seems to have is on how regularly you need to visit the loo.
10. Through pure desperation, despite not having wanted anything to do with your partner for the last 9 months, you reluctantly attempt sex as a last resort, realizing that you need to be some kind of contortionist for this to be humanly possible.
Finally, you reach the acceptance stage – the point at which you begin to think you will win an award for the person who has pregnant for the longest time known to man. Admit defeat, and decide to go back to bed.
One thing is for sure, your baby really WILL come when it’s ready, but good things come to those who wait!!
