I am feeling hidey right now. A little quiet and a little uncertain. I am, I suppose, feeling very human. Fragile. Vulnerable. Like I’m shedding a skin, leaving behind a husk that served me well but is past its time, like I’m wriggling incrementally forward, new and soft.

It’s October now, suddenly and inevitably, an October I’ve been anticipating for months. The child destined to make me a gran and my baby a mama is imminent, and we’re lingering in the eternal Before. He’ll be here any week. Any day. Any second. But it also feels like never, in the way the future is always ethereal. Intangible. A shy feeling. A wry wish.

And so we wait in this season of pregnant expectation. Heavy with longing and wondering and want. Abby, my daughter, the mama-in-waiting, is equally calm and crazed. Absolutely zen and frenetic. Told to rest, eager to hustle, struggling to find an outlet that will satisfy. Perhaps it’s that she knows labor is coming, and she wants to get on with it in any form. I want to soothe her or distract her. I want to interfere. But waiting is the work now, and I won’t rob her of its meat.

I am a little listless lately, I admit, tapping my compass, trying to get its attention so it can adjust my direction. I’m not off-course, exactly, but I’ve been sick, and my gut isn’t yet totally OK, and I’m trying to enter this season of change mindfully. I’ve been told to rest, too, and I’m bad at it. Or rather, I’m bad at resting without guilt. I understand the frantic need to work. To do and do and do and do, lest I sit too long with myself and have to listen and hear and see what I really want. What I really need. Who I am.