I have about 10 hours left, give or take, until I it is officially my due date. And then another 24 hours until I am past it.
This is not a bad thing per se, since as we all know, gestation time is officially anywhere from 38-42 weeks and the 40 week mark is simply an estimated date based on….
Oh screw that.
It sucks.
Although I will say the relative suckage does not nearly compare to the suckage I experienced when Thalia was overdue a whole ten days, two years ago. This put me smack in the middle of a July heatwave, so bloated and cankled and miserable that I could hardly move my fat ass from the ugly glider chair that I enigmatically purchased a few weeks before. And so my mother graciously came over to keep me company on my due date, June 26, to help me bide my time with something more productive than logging onto pregnancy message boards and coming up with snarky responses to questions like OMG I accidentally got a drop of Ben-Gay in my mouth! Did I hurt my baby?
My mother–along with Nate–decided that what I needed was a hobby to occupy my hands and time in the coming weeks. Something simple, calming, productive.
Together they concluded I needed to learn how to knit.
(Please hold your laughter, those who know me and my astounding lack of craftiness, dearth of small motor skills, and pathetically infinitesimal attention span.)
I always envied those who could while away hours with the meditative, rhythmic click click click of the needles, who seemed to experience some sort of inner peace along on the way to a beautiful little set of handmade alpaca baby booties. My sister-in-law is awesome at it, as are my mother and my grandmother. So I figured, it’s in my genes. Why not give it a shot.
How hard can it be if it’s the preferred hobby of arthritic centigenarians worldwide?
My mother presented me with some beautiful yarn to get my imagination flowing, along with some wooden beginner needles. I started to imagine the pride with which I would tell strangers on the street where my newborn daughter got that beeeeeauuuuutiful hat or beaeeeeeuuuuutiful sweater. I would attend those hipster knitting classes in the Lower East Side! I would make new knitting friends! It was all just too perfect.
And then I tried to cast on. Which is knitting-speak for tie a freaking knot on the needle, all except you, Liz, who is not capable of such a difficult task.
90 minutes later–I do not exaggerate–I had not yet cast on.
We looked at websites, we tried animated demos, my mother attempted a dozen ways in which to communicate exactly which way to pull the yarn through the loop so that when I did, it would actually remain on the needle. None of it worked. And just when my frustration was reaching a peak, Nate, who I thought was merely watching this all quietly from the corner, holds up a pair of needles with a stretch of yarn dangling elegantly from it and says, “Look. Like this.”
If there ever would have been a time to justify stabbing someone with the pair of 4″ embroidery scissors that lay at my feet, surely that was it.
I finally threw up my hands in exasperation and allowed my mother to get the thing started for me so the day wouldn’t be a total waste.
The stitches were a bit easier. I did a row, then another. Then another. Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one. Suddenly it seemed…can it be? Is it possible? I was knitting!
Then…
a dropped stitch.
And another.
The realization that the only remedy was to undo an hour of work and go back to the wretched bumpy bit of yarn.
Redos. Redoing the redos.
Finally, holding up my handiwork to see exactly what I had been working on for the past several hours.
With God as my witness, I will never go knitting again.
