Waiting

One friend's twins are due in a few weeks, but in all likelihood she'll go into labor before her due date, because twins usually come early, or so I hear. I was a twin, and I arrived a month early, weighing 5 pounds. (There my mom sat, in the final days of 1968, not knowing until the very end of her pregnancy that she was carrying two very small babies--one of whom would be stillborn. When I had my Peanut, I finally understood what my mother must have felt on New Year's Day in 1969--the joy of having a living daughter, and the anguish over her dead son. But that is another story for another day.)

So my friend waits, joyful in the knowledge that even if her twins come now, they'll be big enough. They'll make it. The boy and the girl. She and her husband will wait, thrilled at what is to come.

Meanwhile another friend, five weeks into her pregnancy, tells me, "I had a miscarriage." The hopes for this pregnancy are at an end. She and her husband will mourn and regroup and try again. They'll wait, hopeful, for what is to come.