“Well I guess we didn’t win the car,” were the first words out of Nate’s mouth this morning–his way of acknowledging having slept through the night without a mad rush to pack a peanut butter sandwich before hightailing it to the hospital.

The free car was the least of my thoughts this morning.

I’m now officially past my due date of the 5th and on my way towards the 7th, shattering our nine month-long fantasy of having a first child born on 07/06/05 and a second on 05/06/07.

The weather is beautiful, I’m on hiatus from my dayjob, and I’m feeling about 600,000 times better than I did at this point in the last pregnancy.

So how come every time someone asks me how I’m doing I feel tears stinging the backs of my eye sockets? I’m fighting the urge to let them flow freely in front of people or I’ll have to explain my feelings. Which I can’t. It ‘s just visceral; the effects of an evil, inebriating cocktail of of anxiety, frustration, hormones and too much Entenmann’s coffee cake that wreaked havoc on my blood sugar.

Yes, I feel claustrophobic in my body, itching to shed this bloated shell of limitations and discomfort. I hate my reliance on Nate, my mother, strangers, to reach that doodad for me or bend down and get that thing, or please, please, can’t you rub my back, just the right side, I know you did it every night for the last week but it just hurts that much…

But despite whatever physical afflictions I’m enduring (and whining about despite my self-loathing for doing so) the emotional purgatory of the unknowable is my real Achilles heel. It always has been. I’m not one for sitting back and waiting for life to happen, and when I can’t make it happen, just the way I want it, it tortures me.

Suddenly I’m envying those celebrities with their scheduled C-sections and simultaneous tummy tucks. Britney Spears, my mommy role model. Who’d have ever thought it.