As of today, April 15th, there are only forty days left to May 25th, my due date, or the metric by which all my medical caregivers concur that my daughter will be fully developed and ready to take her first independent breath… give or take a few days. We can only be so precise when it comes to the business of babies, in which all processes seem to be dictated by a brand of quantum uncertainty, leading me to idly muse if quantum uncertainty applies macrocosmically to all tiny, promising things.
Forty days—and more specifically, forty days and nights—is a curious phrase and is actually not meant to be taken literally. The number forty has various mystical connotations in Semitic cultures, which is why it appears so frequently within texts originating from the Middle East. It’s a number that indicates significant substance when applied to mundane, concrete things, for its true connotation is meant to be applied symbolically so that it’s a kin of own English idiom a lot. If you doubt this, you’ve never been the only adult in a room with about forty teenagers, or had to scale wall that’s about forty feet tall, or had to figure out how you could possibly transport an order of approximately forty customized coffees from Starbucks. So when you’re reading The Arabian Nights—all 1,001 of them, a larger numerical idiom from the culture that gave us Algebra—Ali Baba didn’t cross forty thieves, but he crossed a lot of them, which most would agree is more than he would have ever wanted after him and far more than enough to be very, very worried about his health.
What I can report about my own health is that while I have received clean marks from all the midwives, I have indeed reached the point in my pregnancy in which I’m weary of the nipping exhaustion, the utter failure of sophisticated mental and physical dexterity, the inability to breathe deeply, the persistent ache that tends to tap you on the shoulder when your attentions have been drawn to another ache somewhere on your person. Part of me is ready to reclaim my body as my own, but on the other hand, I am so grateful for and in love with all the biological cues my daughter gives me regularly—from peanut butter cravings to raging thirst—that I will miss them dearly when I can’t meet her needs telepathically and so immediately.
Nevertheless, forty days remain until that magical date arrives. Yet as I have no idea when my body and my daughter’s body will work together to make her birth possible, forty days to me is as nebulous as the Semitic idiom. However, I cannot delude myself into thinking that I have a lot of time between now and then.
Until later, whenever that is.
If you’d like to read more about the symbolism behind forty, click here.
♥ EAB
P.S. For those of you who don’t have a looming date ahead, that May 25th is forty days off also means that there are thirty-eight days left until Memorial Day/Bank Holiday weekend in the US and UK. It’s also exactly forty-three days to Manhattanhenge, and not much longer to many other summery things. Now that you have been warned, you have ample time to wash those white pants you’ve been storing in the closet since September. Cheers!