Prolonged Wait

'सबर का फल मीठा होता है' पर क्या सब लोग मीठे फल की चाहत मैं खुसी खुसी सबर करते है ?

Waiting as such is an irritating, time-consuming and frustrating activity. In this entire world there must be a exceptional few who are amused by the act of waiting but for all the rest of us the word itself terrifies us lest the act of it. If someone makes us to wait for him/her our tempers rise with each passing second and sometimes it just gets into our nerves as we vent them openly. Time in and time out almost everyone has his/her share of waiting to do in life; it maybe for commuting purpose, or for a special somebody or for something we have aspired in our lives or may be for the dreaded performance results. Initially waiting increases our enthusiasm but if done for long duration it not only kills our excitement but also makes us gloomy and depressed.

I am now in the 39^th week of my pregnancy i.e., almost 10 months. Whoever said that the gestational period of humans is 9 months is a male chauvinist figure of this society and believe me if ever I meet him I am going to kill him at that very moment.

I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy being pregnant, I did by all means. Despite of my previous ‘happily ever-after mood’ of being pregnant, now the waiting spree is getting me all wound up with agitation. From the very start of gaining consciousness I hated waiting but customarily in every sphere of my 28 years I have been left to wait for my turn by life itself; and this time also it was just the same as I am practically wait for my baby’s grand arrival. Initially I enjoyed the wait part and was quite excited with each passing moment. But now as I am drawing to the end of my journey I am getting more impatient.

In India, normally all first child are born 2-3 weeks before the estimated date, so we were quite sure that my baby would arrive sometime around the 3^rd week of April. But there was no sign of pain and the week passed off normally. In my visit with my GYN when my mom raised the question about being late in delivery she said that in America the first child generally comes after the due date. To this my mom promptly said, “But she (i.e., me) is an Indian”. The GYN then replied with a smile, “She might be an Indian but her baby is an American and American babies arrive late”. Mark the irony, now the baby and the mother have two different nationalities. My unborn baby is an American while he is still inside the womb of his Indian mother.

So, according to the American Medical Bible I have to wait for another one week after my due date and all my Indian ancestry has no implication anymore. The paradox here is that when I am unable to wait for my due date, and now I am made to wait later than that. It isn’t that I am in terrible pain and the baby isn’t buzzing. My American baby is having an ultimate time rolling happily and enjoying the delicacies inside me while I crib about my numb senses and overstretched abdomen. The dreadful anticipated pain is no where around the corner but instead of that I have all sorts of cramps in all odd parts of my body.

I remember one day I screamed out to my mom owing to an awful cramp and a sudden heightened pain, but my mom laughed with excitement as she thought that my contraction at last started but it was just a mirage.

So, here I am in my 39^th week of pregnancy daily praying to the Almighty to bless me with contraction pains so that I can deliver my baby and get over with the anticipation. But again ‘me being me’, I think that if the prelude to the motherhood is so mind boggling then what it would be to actually face motherhood. Facing motherhood is yet another challenge that would require a completely different set of attributes with patience being in the top of the list. Now, just think me and patience, can we ever coincide? That is a hell of a question and I will come to it when I come to it and that would make another post but for now I wait. 

For all those who would advice me on having a patient attitude at this point of my pregnancy the below lines are for them.

“If men were equally at risk from this condition—if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains—then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.”

-Barbara Ehrenreich

"If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters." - Nora Ephron