Photo via Wikimedia
Aubrey Hirsch’s previous Loco Parentis columns can be found here.
In my experience, the question you get asked most often when you’re pregnant is “When are you due?” It’s almost reflexive. Someone sees your distended belly, offers their congratulations and then, without hesitation, asks, “When are you due?”
When I was pregnant with my son, I didn’t really mind this question. I found it mildly annoying (like I do most pregnancy-related questions), but not particularly intrusive. It was an easy question to answer. October fifth. It came rolling off my tongue easily, almost robotically, and over and over again. If all my utterances over those nine months were put into a word cloud, “October fifth” would loom large as the phrase I said most often by far.
I held that date in my mind like a lucky number. I marked it on my calendar with a big red heart. I counted down to it with the help of my pregnancy app. Twenty-two more weeks! Sixteen more weeks! Four more weeks!
My doctor kept remarking on my baby’s size (he was always measuring ahead) and emphatically predicted that I’d go into labor early. When I traveled to Philadelphia for my cousin’s wedding at 37 weeks pregnant, we had the carseat installed in the back—just in case.
When we were about a week out, I said to my husband, “If I’m still pregnant on the 5th, let’s do something special to celebrate. Go out to dinner or something.”
And indeed, the 5th came and went and I was still pregnant. My husband took me out for a fancy dessert, but I couldn’t really enjoy it. I was tired, uncomfortable, sick of being pregnant. But, worse than that, I felt totally unmoored. For nine long months I’d fixated on this magical date and here it was! And yet…nothing was happening. The red heart on my calendar glared at me, mockingly. It was October 5th. Where was my baby? With no new date to grasp onto, it felt like I might be pregnant forever.
The calls and texts were also endless. “No baby yet?” “When are you going to have that baby?” “Did you have the baby?” “When’s the baby coming?” Not only was I sorely disappointed, but it felt like I was disappointing everyone else around me, too. That my still being pregnant was my first failure as a mother. I couldn’t even produce my own baby.
Of course I know that only about 5% of women actually give birth on their due date and, in reality, the vast majority of births are spread out over the month surrounding that date. But that didn’t stop me from fixating on October 5th so hard that sometimes I have trouble remembering my son’s actual birthday: October 12th.
So with this pregnancy, I’m trying something new: no due date.
I’m not thinking about it. I’m not marking it on my calendar. I’m not planning anything special. And I’m certainly not telling anyone.
So far this plan has gone over fairly well. When someone asks when I’m due (and they always do), I give them a ballpark range, something like “early summer,” or, since I’m an academic, “after the school year’s over.” About 90% of the time, that answer suffices. Most people don’t really even want to know. They just feel they have to ask.
When someone does press me with a “What’s the due date?” I can usually laugh it off by saying, “I’m not falling for that ‘due date’ thing again. What a racket that is!” That takes care of another 7% or so.
That leaves the pushy 3% who are almost always strangers and, for some reason, find it absolutely necessary to have this information. When they counter with, “You won’t tell me?” I find a frosty “Do you need to know?” is enough to shut down the Q&A.
My family’s been pretty understanding, too. I explained how psychologically taxing it was to field the constant barrage of calls and texts on the days leading up to and following that very anticlimactic October 5th. At one point my mother asked, “Will you tell us the due date when it gets closer so we can plan?” I told her, no one wants to plan for this birth more than I do, but the truth is, I don’t know when this baby will come.
And this time, I’m not going to pretend I do.
So there will be no due date for me this pregnancy. No “early” baby or “late” baby. At some point, in early summer, there will be a baby. That’s all I’m focusing on for now. And you know what? It already feels so much better.
Tags: aubrey hirsch, loco parentis, the butter
My unfortunate addiction to the Baby Center app forums has convinced me that doctors need to staaaaahhhpp with the telling you anything about how your baby is measuring, what your cervix is doing and whether you are even pregnant. So you are 400% effaced and 30 centimeters dilated 2 weeks before your due date? It means nothing. All is but ineffectual signs and portents.
I’m 39 weeks pregnant with my second right now and really enjoying how every potential labor symptom means you could have the baby in 3 hours or 3 weeks. Doesn’t she know I have freelance deadlines to plan??
Wait, whether you’re even pregnant? I feel like that is pretty necessary.
Hear, hear! My baby was an agonizing two weeks and one day “late”. I had always hedged answering questions about my due date too, but it was even harder to figure out what to say when they asked “when are you due?” and the answer was “two weeks ago…”
A friend of mine tells people she’s due “same time as the deer”, which I think is a nice way of putting it (even if it’s technically incorrect because she’s due about a month before the deer and she knows it).
She has a pet deer, then? Or has deer in her backyard and one is visibly pregnant? Or she communes with the animals and has heard gossip that one is with fawn spawn?
I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEER.
I find the idea of a pet deer delightful but the OP might mean something more in the ballpark of “general/misc. deer” as in, springtime deer baby-having time.
Yeah, that’s what she means, sadly. She lives in the middle of the woods, so it’s possible she has deer in her backyard, but I bet her dog makes it not the safest place for baby deer births 🙁
fawn spawn!
😀
I wish I had any kind of reason to use this in a sentence.
I didn’t mind sharing the due date, but it did feel slightly odd when I got down to the wire and I’d have (well-meaning) co-workers and extended family ask if I was dialating after each dr visit. I understand that they were basically asking “so, are there measurable physical symptoms that would indicate the infant’s arrival” but still — you are asking questions about my CERVIX. I had a LEEP procedure about 10 years ago — want a run down of that too?
Well, of course, because nothing about the female body is off limits to anyone else. Don’t be silly thinking you have a right to like, *privacy* or anything.
Then again, I wonder, given all the interest, should I have kept up my cervical updates post bebe? Carried a picture in my wallet, include it in the yearly holiday letter (“seasons greetings from my cervix”), etc.
I feel you. It’s interesting when people (especially not those directly involved) demand a due date, like that way there’s order and control over an event where there’s not that much control.
My estimated “due date” meant nothing, as my daughter was born 3.5 weeks early by scheduled C-section. Two weeks beforehand, the original date of the surgery had to be pushed out 2 days, as the OR was fully booked on that day. My mother was annoyed because it messed up her plans – even after I reminded her that she knew the date and approximate time her grandkid would be born. Sigh.
I can only imagine how exhausted my own mother must have been when she was pregnant – I was born 19 days late. I think knowing that helped me avoid placing too much emphasis on the magical “official” due date with my first pregnancy, but now with my second I’m having to make a conscious effort not to do an obsessive countdown. 53 days… 1272 hours… it’s so tempting to latch on to that as scientific fact, but it’s not real, as much as my sciatic pain makes me want it to be.
This is such a great thing. I went to a sporting event on my due date. The ladies at the snack bar were shocked when that question was answered with “Today.” It was the one time I truly enjoyed telling someone what my due date was. Mwahaha!
Haha! I remember working on my due date last time and answering the same when customers asked.
I worked a week past my due date with #2 and there is no joy like the faces people make when you answer that question with “Yesterday.”
I grew up with a baby-loving grandmother, who was always the first to offer to babysit/clean/just hold the baby for as long as you need, and was similarly feistily happy to chase off irritating men. Watching her, I learned that “When are you due?” is the polite thing to ask a pregnant woman. It never occurred to me that this might not be the case. Thanks so much for this piece!
FWIW, I don’t think it’s necessarily a rude question. There’s only so much small talk you can make about pregnancy, after all. If the person follows up with something vague and you push for specifics, THEN it gets weird.
Yes. It’s like asking someone where they’re from; it’s a totally innocuous question until they say “New York” and you go “But where are you REALLY from?”
This is a very good idea.
When I was in labor with my son, the L&D room wasn’t ready for us yet so we walked around the hospital campus. Someone asked me when I was due and I got to answer, “Oh, I’m actually in labor right now.” (I was between contractions so I could form coherent sentences)
When my brother was born, my mom stopped at the grocery store before going to the hospital (I don’t know either) and got to say that to an acquaintance she ran into.
I started to come along on a Friday night when my parents had friends over for Friday night drinks.
Several refused to leave because “you’ve got time!”
This should be the default response regardless of how pregnant the woman is.
Both my obstetricians (two babies, two diff. doctors) were very clear on the fact that there was a plus-or-minus of two weeks on either side and that therefore, the due date was more of a due month. They were kind of old-school doctors, though.
I found the constant “When are you due?” “How are you feeling?” and other questions I can’t remember now pretty annoying while pregnant, but they’re the same questions I ask my pregnant friends/family still. It’s natural. I don’t think it’s rude, it’s just that you hear it ALL THE TIME for months on end! 🙂
Okay, but…
Is it the birthday of anyone famous?
What day of the week is it?
Is it before or after Memorial Day?
What about Arbor Day?
What Catholic Saint’s feast day?
What is the Kabbalistic value of the date in question?
What zodiacal symbol is it?
Waxing or waning Moon?
Will Mercury be in retrograde?
If you had an identically pregnant twin, and one of you always lied, and one of you always told the truth, and I asked the other one what date you WEREN’T due on, what would they say?
I love this because I hate due dates and asking them (even though I do sometimes when I don’t know what else to say). I didn’t get around to seeing a doctor about my second pregnancy until almost my second trimester. I’d only had that terrifying swooping feeling while standing around once in my life, and it was followed by my spending hours on the couch demanding raw vegetables and junk food, and insisting that I “didn’t have enough blood” to get up and do anything the first time too. I knew what was going on. Because I took my sweet time actually seeing a doctor (my previous experience had been with an OBGYN practice whose policy was to treat you like an idiot and ask you if you’d quit smoking yet before opening your chart and seeing that you had never been a smoker), the new doctor gave me a due date that I knew was ludicrously early. I tried to tell them that was impossibly early, and they just shook their fancy ultrasounds at me. So my second boy missed his due date, and the doctor kept looking GRIM each passing day, and I really didn’t see the big deal because the date they gave me was too early, but I was finally induced like a week later. I don’t recommend it, although once I could see the way things were going I just accepted the mindless cascade of interventions, and unexpectedly dropped my 8 1/2lb son in a bath tub while my husband was out on a smoke break, and it really wasn’t that bad. Memories. Point is, I guess I can’t stop myself from sharing my birth story, and due dates are kind of silly. I was out dancing on my older son’s due date–I was fit then. People in the club were like, “when are you due!?” And I was like, “tonight!” And toasted them with my cranberry and club soda. I will never be that fit or socially adept again. Shit.
Sorry, buy I did like talking about it! I think we just need more cultural acknowledgment of "not really into this" cues, rather than blanket rules.
My due date was 14 October, but I was convinced the baby would be late. In fact, I thought she arrive on 20 October, exactly a year since we got the cat.
She did.
I had a very big baby, skinny but tall, who was snuggled up to a large fibroid, and I carried low in front. I started getting “IS IT TWINS? THAT’S NOT NORMAL IF IT ISN’T TWINS” during the end of my second trimester. By the end of the third, when some bikers rubbernecking in giddy horror at the sight of me almost had an accident, I was as ready as anyone else for it to happen, and also thoroughly sick of people (I have a whole set of cutting responses for next time, if there is a next time). Of course my due date came and went, and I started getting calls from people going “did you have it?” The worst was from this braggart I’m no longer friends with who had to call to remind me that SHE had given birth, all-naturally, ON HER DUE DATE, and was I going to do the right thing and wait even though I was too late to be healthy, or was I going to be lazy and USE DRUGS to get it going. Or actually, for some reason, the worst was when my husband and I were out for a walk (I was also one of those pregnant women who was fine taking long walks up until the day of, aside from all the gasping and pointing it occasioned in others), and my neighbor saw us and actually screamed from across the street, “еще нет???” (“still nothing?”) People, man.
Also, I don’t know if it’s a perversion of the Protestant work ethic or what, but there seems to be a perception I’ve noticed, on online pregnancy boards as well as IRL, that if your baby doesn’t come on your due date or a little early, you’re already defective somehow, which is really weird.
I mean, I hate to bust out the evolutionary-psych shit, but there is a pretty good reason why plenty of people have genuine OMG BABIES feelings.
I was 11 days after my ‘due’ date. I started directing all text/email/Facebook enquiries to http://www.haveyouhadthatbabyyet.com and then handed my phone to my mum to field them all for a few days.
My mother-in-law rang to ask, again, while I was actually giving birth (home birth) and my mum was so overcome with emotion she just cried ‘oh!’ and hung up the phone!
I literally cannot keep track of what the doctors think my due date is, because they keep changing it based on every ultrasound, except the changes make it into the charts is some departments but not others. And they say they have to do this, because basing it on your last menstrual period is just an estimate, anyway. But that’s not relevant to me, because I happen to know exactly how big that blastocyst was and what day they transferred it, so. It only seems relevant insofar as my workplace will start my maternity/disability leave 2 weeks before the due date. Whenever that is.
In any case, I just say “early May,” and precisely nobody has asked me for details beyond that.
There's nothing wrong with having OMG BABIES feelings or wanting to talk about pregnancy! But a lot of women don't have those feelings and are kind of made to feel like unfeeling monsters if they don't show any interest in it. So they end up asking awkward questions about other people's anatomies that they don't actually want to know the answer to. You want to be polite and show interest in what is a huge life event a pregnancy is, but unless it's a close friend or relative it's happening to, you're just not that invested in it. Then you've got pregnant women talking about their cervix's and dilation wands and peeing all the time and it's like, where does the "inappropriate" line even get drawn?