“When are you due?” It seems like such a harmless question that everyone wants to know the answer to when you’re pregnant. The tricky part, for me, with giving out this information is that most people ignore the “estimated” part.
I shared Micah’s EDD freely with friends and family. I, myself, expected him to arrive on or before that date. He didn’t. I was induced one day after he was “due” to arrive, even though my body showed no indications that it was preparing for labor any time soon. I responded poorly to the induction methods used, was labeled a failure to progress, and had a C-section. One of many things that I learned from that experience was that my estimated due date was probably wrong.
For my second pregnancy, I chose to calculate the EDD based on when I believed we conceived instead of the standard first day of my last menstrual period. I had been keeping meticulous records of my cycle after Micah was born and felt like this estimate would be more accurate. Another perk was that it gave me a bonus week to gestate. My EDD was November 28th, which changed to the 30th after measurements were taken at my twenty-week anatomy scan. It would have been the 22nd if we had calculated based on the first day of my last MP.
From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to protect this information and chose to share the due month instead. December. Not November – December. I knew my body would go late and felt like I was doing my best to prepare family and friends of that fact by keeping mum about the exact date. I wanted to avoid the pressure of being looked at like a ticking time bomb; I wanted to avoid the unsolicited advice for getting the baby out; and I definitely wanted to avoid judgment for allowing the pregnancy to go beyond forty-two weeks. I trusted that my body knew when it would be ready to go into labor, that my baby knew when she was ready to be born.
Mila was born on December 10th, at forty-one weeks and three days according to my November 30th EDD. If we had calculated from the first day of my last menstrual period, she was born at forty-two weeks and four days. I chose not to be confined by the estimated due date, and as a result was rewarded with a labor that began and progressed completely naturally. I knew when labor began that my body was truly ready.
