This Patience Business

When I was producing our graduate film in college, the director came up with a great idea. “I know,” she said, “let’s have an original soundtrack!” Yes, fabulous idea. If you know lots of musos, people with talent, and someone who wants to work for free, or possibly less than that. Ideally paying us.
More in hope than anticipation I stuck up some flyers and thought little of it. Until my housebrick of a mobile trilled (this was the 90s)…

Enthusiastic voice: “Hi, I’m calling about the ad for a composer.”

World-weary twenty-year-old with low expectations: “Oh right, lovely. So do you have any experience?”

Still hopeful caller: “Well my name is Ray Harman and I’m in a band called Something Happens”

I nearly drop the phone.

Something Happens were an amazing and hugely popular Irish band (who still tour occasionally) and Ray Harman turned out to be a generous and lovely man who did indeed compose the soundtrack for our film. The experience reminds me that humility is underestimated (still cringe at the ‘any experience’ question) but equally that if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Right now one of their songs is fairly stuck in my head – the lyric goes

sitting on my hands to stop myself exploding/
I can’t get used to this patience business

I’m now 39 weeks, and getting a little… well, antsy.

With my due date falling towards the end of the month, chances are that Baby D will indeed arrive during July 2012 as I expect that the hospital won’t be keen to let me go more than two weeks past my EDD because of my age.

It’s brilliantly scary to think I’ll be a mum this month. I’ve had a few mini meltdowns which I’m attributing to hormones and to saying goodbye to my mum when she visited for the weekend. When I saw her arriving up the escalator at the train station, Mr D asked why I’d gone “all pink” – because I was about to burst into tears in the middle of Tottenham Hale. We did very little all weekend except some knitting and gardening. When I say “we” – she helped with the cardigan I’m knitting for the boy and then pointed out that what I thought was a white Morning Glory all along the trellis in our garden was in fact its pernicious lowborn cousin, bindwind. She sprayed the weedkiller I’ve been forbidden to touch, and together we ripped out perennials that had gone over and said ‘so long,’ to rose suckers.

It was fab. Low key, uneventful, and fab. Mum said she was so glad to see ‘her baby with a bump’. After all these years, she might never have thought that that might happen. Although she now already has one new grandson courtesy of my brother and another on the way. It’s totally endearing too how protective my brother has become towards me since his wife had a less than ideal birth.

Now all I have to do it wait. Without wishing these last days of calm away, or trying to second guess how things will unfold, and when. I’m filling my time with seeing lots of friends locally (particularly thankful for NCT group, only one baby has already arrived but we’ve passed a couple of due dates) and equally procrastinating about finishing projects like the boy’s quilt and knitted blanket, putting the pictures up in his room and gathering all the last bits from around the house which need to be actually placed into the hospital bag. That makes it all seem so very real, if we’re actually “ready”. You could say I’m stuck between ‘this patience business’ and ‘something happens’ – and trying to not just focus on how much limbo might be left.

Photo from muteboy’s Flickr stream under a Creative Commons licence