On Normalcy

I'm 37 weeks along today. Full term - which means the baby could be born any day.

It's odd knowing that at some point in the next 3 to 5 weeks my body will go through something over which I have no control. No matter how many books I've read or classes I've been to, I don't know how it will feel and, assuming all goes as it should, I don't know when it will happen. I can't pencil it into the calendar and I can't make a perfect plan for how it will all go down.

I watched an episode of Dexter last weekend and, at the end, as the main character sat with his girlfriend at dinner, they concurred that they wanted the same thing out of life: to be normal.

At first it struck me as rather unambitious - the desire to be normal. But this past week has been one of anything but normal. I've had friends faced with extraordinary events, seen things that I never thought could happen and even something as silly as the weather - with tornadoes one week and snow flurries the next - has been out-of-the-norm.

It's made me realize that normal is really underrated.

For a good part of my pregnancy I've wanted things to be anything but normal. At first I didn't take pictures because I thought I looked fat or because I knew I didn't have the time or tools to make the pictures look perfect. Most recently, I've put off sharing the nursery because I haven't had time to attend to the tiny finishing details. And, for almost every day over the past week, I've spent my evenings stressed out because I know the baby could arrive any day and our house isn't Martha-Stewart-style organized.

But today I realized that, even if I had all of the time in the world, I'd never get things perfect and, even if I could, I don't know if I'd want to.

There's something to be said for normal - for sitting on the couch with my husband and discussing our day while he rubs my feet instead of spending the evening running around crazy, scrubbing floors or organizing drawers. Having a normal pregnancy thus far has been a blessing and I'm lucky to still feel great. And, there's nothing I love more than my completely normal house, family and friends.

That's not to say that there aren't things that I find extraordinary about my life or that I don't have reasons for thinking that my friends and family are better than most but, on paper, I live a pretty darn normal existence and for that I'm thankful. I'm happy to be normal and I, too, want little more than to continue to be normal for a long time to come.