Pregnant woman

My daughter, Shelayne, is expecting her second child and is five days past her due date. 

I understand how frustrating that is.  I was pregnant six times and my first two children were both three weeks overdue.  I thought I would go crazy!  Now, they won’t let you go longer than two weeks before they will induce the baby.

But, in the meantime, you just have to wait. 

I feel guilty even complaining about waiting myself, but my life is also on hold.    I promised that I would come for a week after the baby was born to look after her two year old son and help with the meals and housework so that she could rest.  She has no family or close friends to help her.

Shelayne lives twelve hours away in Fort St. James in northern BC and I live on the Coast, about an hour east of Vancouver.  I have to book a flight to Prince George and then her husband has to drive for two hours to come and get me.  I have no intention of driving in the snow up there. 

I also have to book the time off work, but I can’t do anything until she has the baby.  I am working as a nurse over Christmas too, so I have to be back before Chrismas.

I’d been complaining and fretting about something I couldn’t do anything about – and in the process was not getting done what I needed to do.  I had basically put my life on hold.

On Sunday, I realized what I was doing.  I remembered an old saying: “when the time for action arrives, the time for preparation has past.”  I had lists in my mind of what I needed to do before I went up to my daughter but I had done none of them.

I got busy.  I wrapped all the gifts that had been bought, finished decorating the house, bought the few remaining gifts, worked on the Christmas Eve Party and Christmas dinner menu with my older daughter and brought up the suitcases and started to pack.  Just getting busy, doing what I could, took a lot of the pressure off.

Then I had a good look at the calendar, thought about it and decided to be pro-active.  If I was going to stay for a week and still be back home to work at Christmas, I would have to leave in the next couple of days.  I checked the flights options, chose one and called my daughter to confirm that her husband could pick me up and booked the last flight available.

So, I am leaving early Wednesday morning.  Shelayne will be six days overdue then.  Hopefully she will have her baby in the next couple of days.  Again, I can’t do anything about that, but I have done everything I can do on my side – and now, I will leave it up to God.

There are so many things in life that we have no control over, that we just have to wait for.  But the one thing we do have control over is ourselves and what we do about what is happening – or not happening – in our lives.  We can choose to sit and stress or we can choose to stagnate and do nothing, or we can choose to do everything within our power to improve the situation.

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