Last night as I was falling asleep, I tried to articulate to my partner the sensation of nervous anticipation lodged inside my gut. “It’s like I’ve paid for a rollercoaster ride and waited my turn and any minute now I will be seated,” I said. “There’s no going back.” Unlike my sister, or my niblings, I’ve always had to be coaxed into vertiginous rides. When I do consent, grudgingly, my way of coping with the unknown is to keep my eyes closed until I make it to the other side. I can rarely mask my relief when it’s over. I am happy to be returned to the comfort of the ground. I have a memory of being five years old and on a rollercoaster at Fun City in Kuwait. I screamed so loudly about wanting to get off, they stopped the ride and let me go. I cannot vouch for whether this really happened, or if I imagined it, but I remember it vividly. It was no wonder then that when I fell asleep last night I was visited by a recurring dream, one that has manifested ahead of many life-altering occasions—I find myself at the wheel of a car, except I don’t know how to drive, but I’m expected to fake it. I somehow usually manage, reminding myself of whatever basics I may have absorbed osmotically. Last night, for instance, I kept saying over and over, ‘keep your feet close to the brakes’.

I don’t know, though, if I’ve ever encountered a moment as climactic as this one—a clear case of a phase of my life coming to an end and a new one beginning. There really is no going back, no returning to anything prior. Today is a Wednesday, and while I normally dispatch my columns on Thursdays, this time I know I will spend tomorrow recovering from the scheduled C-Section and navigating the commencement of maternity. Though I’m aware that since I conceived I ceased being a singular entity as I became host to another being, I am still baffled by the knowledge that I will finally encounter our child in all his flesh-and-bone-ness, that this being whose presence I have felt from the moment it tumbled into my uterus, whose heartbeat I saw and heard when it was still embryo, and who I’ve watched grow over the months—the space occupying his four-chambered heart enlarging, his thigh bone stretching astonishingly to suggest his advanced height, will no longer be crouched protectively within my womb but a sovereign entity.