it is may 12. i am 41 weeks pregnant. my state has been in lockdown for more than 8 weeks.
quarantine has felt from the beginning like a liminal space: a period of waiting; a held breath; unreal. to watch my due date come and go feels similarly liminal. someday the world will open back up. someday i will have this baby. life—different—will move on. for now, though, we wait.
*
my first child was born nearly two weeks early. i lost my mucus plug that morning. i had my first contraction at 4, and a baby shortly after 9. neat, clean.
this time is all meager false starts and signs that point nowhere. single suspicious cramps, a slow meaningless secretion of mucus, as stretch marks spider low across my belly and the baby continues to kick, stretch, roll. i stopped work almost 2 weeks ago and now i lay in bed most of the day: eat (though i am never hungry), drink, nap. make vague gestures at homeschooling. stare at the trees outside my bedroom window as the light filters through their yellow-green new leaves. everything is slow. i am so tired.
*
once a week i visit the hospital. the birth center has been shut down. so has most of the hospital. the path to the office where my midwife is working now is all roped off, empty wings, police in masks. the silence is eerie. at the building entrance is a mandatory hand sanitizer station, a temperature check, in the last two weeks, have you.... in the waiting room i am the only patient. sometimes i pass another woman, pregnant too, on the stairs. we shift to keep as far apart as possible, our faces turned away, our heads down.
*
i know this will not last forever. the baby will come. we will all stumble through a new way of living together. for now, though—for now the afternoons, the days, the weeks stretch on. i am neither here nor there. in a quiet space from which anything might happen but nothing ever does.
