Someone asked me last night how long I had before Eloise was to be born. I couldn’t really do the math (I don’t know which is worse- the fact that I didn’t know what day it was, or that I couldn’t calculate the passage of time between date A and date B), so I quickly downloaded the “What to Expect When you’re Expecting” iPhone App. It’s a handy little tool that tells you all sorts of things from how big the baby currently is, to what she is doing, to what you should feel like. So I typed in my due date and pressed enter and that’s when I saw it, clearly displayed in the section called “Countdown to Baby”:

3 weeks, 4 days

That’s all. Just three weeks and four days until my baby is due. Until I am someone’s mother. MOTHER.

I made me feel a little queasy. Like I could sense the earth turning underneath my feet at 700 miles per hour. I tried to think of what I could do to stop this turning, this moving, this passage of time, but I couldn’t think of any good ideas. You can’t stop time. And I can’t stop the passage of my life from one stage to the next. I will be a mother in 3 weeks, 4 days. The iphone said so.

I can’t say that I am not excited about meeting my daughter. I really am. But I can’t help but admit that I am also grieving the loss of my childhood, my teenage years, and my young adulthood. I’m not playing house anymore. I am the house.  It all went so fast. In my mind, I am still a 16 year old in health class who’s about to be assigned her “Baby Think it Over” (which, for those of you who were not lucky enough to deal with one of these, is a doll that cries all the time and you have to put a key in it’s back to make it stop- it’s supposed to annoy you enough to make you not want to have sex and become an unwed teenage mother). But I’m not an unwed teenage mother- I’m a married mother who is 25. I don’t get to think this baby over and bring it back to health class after the weekend- she’s mine. FOREVER. And she’ll be here in THREE WEEKS.

I suddenly want to be able to document every moment of my life before the shift. Like if I don’t, I will never remember how it feels to be Laura without baby. I’m scared that I’ll forget that I ever had goals, ideas, desires of my very own. I’m scared that I am going to totally lose myself in this phase of life.

I’m scared that I am going to go to sleep the day she is born and wake up 10 years later in a Target parking lot in my Nissan Quest minivan.  I’ll crawl over the car seats, Nintendo DS systems, piles of toys and trash into the way back and cry my eyes out for about two hours because I don’t know who I am anymore, or what my point is in life. One of the Target employees will finally tap on the window and ask me if I’m okay, and I will say no. Embarrassed, I crawl back over the seats, the trash, the toys, and the monuments to motherhood  in my car into the driver’s seat, check out my smeared reflection in the rear view mirror, and decide that I am tired of thinking about other people and that I should think about myself for once. So I put the Quest in drive and proceed to the nearest big city, where I will get an apartment, a waitressing job, and a take a pottery class  at a community college to try to figure out who I am. Women are crazy- we do that stuff. It happens all the time. I’ve seen it happen to people I know. It could easily happen to me.

So in the name of prevention, I am trying so hard to savor the last three weeks of my life before the monuments of motherhood fill up my van and make me forget who I am. But everything is moving too fast for me to do that. And I don’t know how to stop it. I know having children is wonderful, and having Eloise is going to be more impossibly wonderful than I can even imagine, and I probably will enjoy losing myself in the monuments of motherhood, but it doesn’t stop me from wishing I had world enough…and time.