Full. Term.

Today, The Bump.com, proclaimed that I am officially full term.

This has never, ever happened before and soon, I will be the mother of way too many children in the modern era. I will be the old woman who lived in the shoe. I will have a son and he will come home with me.

It seems impossibly normal.

And if anything, I have quite an abnormal track record. All of this is enough to leave me pinching myself. It has put me in a state of procrastination and denial that is hundreds of feet deep. How can this normal pregnancy be happening to me?

Normalcy has been a balloon that keeps floating higher and higher. I can never quite reach it. I am not sure I should bother trying; but the competitor in me cannot stop herself, even though once a balloon slips from your finger tips and the wind has it, it is typically gone forever.

Except when it isn't; sometimes the wind gusts the other way.

I could list all the ways my life has been abnormal from its start in 1977 to its current state, but I despise lists and grudges. Suffice it to say: it has given me plenty of fodder for a memoir, for therapy (although I've never, ever been) and to cry about (although I am not one to cry, because of generalized cry baby hatred and tendency to puff up).

I have spent this pregnancy just assuming preeclampsia would settle in for a visit; knowing that I did not care, because it has always worked out. And avoiding bed rest (clearly, it is useless, I never rest.) and taking my blood pressure. I've been waiting for the gust of wind to end it all.

But, here I am, in some sort of normal, holding on to my little red balloon that somehow floated back down to me.

Full. Term. Fully. Normal.