Chapter 41. The Final Stretch

As “twenty-something” weeks became “thirty-something,” the last stretch of Marina’s pregnancy turned into a bit of a numbers game. We knew that a typical pregnancy was forty weeks. And we knew that, out of caution, Marina would be induced on week thirty-nine. But the question remained —what happens if baby comes sooner?

“I asked ChatGPT to calculate the probability of birth by week of an I.V.F. pregnancy of a woman who’s in her mid-thirties and has already had one child,” I said to Jaime one afternoon after work, as we walked down Thirty-Fourth Street toward the East River ferry.

It was one of those gray Manhattan evenings when the city seemed to move in every direction at once. Office workers spilled onto the sidewalks in loose tides, weaving around tourists who stopped abruptly to take photos of the Empire State Building from ten different angles. A delivery bike shot between lanes of traffic. Somewhere behind us, a siren wailed and then dissolved into the constant hum of buses and horns.

Jaime adjusted the strap of his computer bag and looked over at me.

“Of course you did,” he said, completely unimpressed.

“I’m serious,” I said. “It turns out that the odds increase significantly from six percent at week thirty-six to seventeen percent at week thirty-seven, then peak at around twenty-seven percent between weeks thirty-eight and thirty-nine.”

Jaime blinked at me.

“You’re plugging our son into a spreadsheet?”

“I calculate risk for a living,” I said, laughing.

“What’s your point?” Jaime asked.

We stopped briefly at a crosswalk as a cop in a bright yellow traffic control vest waved for cars to keep moving. Down the avenue, the glass buildings near the water reflected the last pale light of the afternoon.

“My point is,” I said once the light changed, “maybe we’re heading to Arkansas too late. Should we head there sooner?”

We had bought our plane tickets back in January, for May 27th. It had seemed reasonable at the time: we’d get there four days before the scheduled induction date, and ten days before the estimated due date. But now, as the calendar narrowed and every week suddenly sounded dangerously close to the next, I was having second thoughts.

“We’d have to look for another Airbnb,” Jaime said, already pulling out his phone as we walked. “The one we booked isn’t available.”

“Ugh,” I said. “That’s not ideal.”

A few seconds passed.

“We’d also have to get another car,” he added. “The one we booked is gone too.”

I groaned. “Also not ideal.”

We reached the waterfront just as the ferry was pulling in. The wind off the East River was colder there, whipping around us hard enough to make everyone instinctively hunch their shoulders. Across the water, the Pepsi sign glowed in bright red lights against the darkening sky.

“I mean —we can look for another place and another car if it’ll make you feel better,” Jaime said.

I thought for a second as I pulled my phone out to activate our ferry tickets.

“No —too complicated,” I finally said. “We have to trust that things will work out as they should.”

Jaime smiled a little at that, like he knew how unusual it was for me to say it.

Only a few months earlier, I would have spiraled with anxiety over the decision. But perhaps the dozens of times we’d faced uncertainty and unpredictability had taught me that sometimes you just have to let go.

“Let’s see how things evolve,” Jaime replied. “Marina will start having weekly checkups soon, and Dr. Dawson can tell us if there are any signs things may be happening sooner.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We can ask.”

So ask we did. The next time we spoke with Marina, we asked if she could bring it up at her next appointment. And she did.

“What did Dr. Dawson say?” Jaime asked when she came out of her appointment the following week.

Marina laughed immediately.

“She said that y’all are clearly guys,” she said. “That’s not how pregnancy works. Jaidan will come when he comes.”

We laughed too, feeling slightly embarrassed.

“I’ll let you know if anything changes,” she said. “I’ll start going in weekly in May. For now, just enjoy that you’re still kid-free.”

That was what everyone kept saying to us: Enjoy your freedom while you can. Get in all the sleep now!

But the thing was, we had been waiting for this moment for almost four years. And now we were in the final stretch. We were nervous, eager, terrified, anxious, and over the moon —all at once. The idea that we were supposed to be calmly savoring our final uninterrupted nights of sleep felt almost ridiculous. Sleeping eight hours straight had already gone out the window months earlier, replaced by middle-of-the-night spirals about car seats, court paperwork, and whether babies could somehow sense inexperience.

Still, we tried to follow the other advice —the go out and enjoy yourselves advice. Nothing wild, just the ordinary things we knew would become more complicated once Jaidan arrived: date nights in the middle of the week, movies that started after 9 p.m., Broadway plays that ended close to midnight, stopping for a drink on our way home after work because we felt like it. Long Sunday brunches with friends that somehow stretched into evening karaoke sessions after one too many rounds of mimosas.

Every outing started to feel oddly significant, like we were quietly collecting the final scenes of one version of our life before stepping into another.

Then one evening after work, a thick envelope arrived.

“I think this is it,” I said to Jaime, immediately recognizing the name of our lawyer printed in the top right corner.

I barely waited until we got upstairs to open it.

“This court recognizes that the baby to be born on or around June 6 is lawfully the son of—”

Jaime interrupted me with a hug so sudden I almost dropped the papers.

This was it —the final document recognizing us as parents. Rationally, we knew it was unlikely the judge would rule against us. But still, we had spent weeks holding our breath without fully admitting it to each other.

“We’re going to be parents,” Jaime said.

I hugged him back, the signed court order still crumpled in my hand. Over his shoulder, I read the line one more time, almost needing to confirm it still existed.

“We’re going to be dads,” I said quietly, feeling a tear slide down my cheek.

Suddenly, the pieces had begun to fall into place. We had a nursery. We had our plane tickets booked. We had the court order. We had slowly fought our way through the maze of parental leave paperwork and finally built something resembling a plan that would allow us to stagger our time off and survive the summer.

For the first time, it all felt real in a practical, irreversible way.

That weekend, we started getting things ready at home.

We unpacked all the baby clothes we had received from our registry —along with the tiny outfits we’d impulsively bought over the previous months—and washed them.

“Look at this,” Jaime said, holding up a pair of tiny denim overalls between two fingers.

“It’s incredibly small,” I said, grinning. “Are you sure you didn’t accidentally shrink it in the dryer?”

He laughed and held it against his chest. It barely covered half his torso.

We carefully folded the clothes —and let me tell you, folding baby clothes is much harder than you’d think. Somehow the smaller the item, the more impossible it became to fold neatly. We filled the dresser in the nursery with onesies, pajamas, socks, and burp cloths, setting aside the newborn-sized pieces to pack in a suitcase so we’d be ready, just in case.

Little by little, the apartment began to change around us.

Cupboards that had once held kitchen appliances made way for baby bottles and pacifiers. Drawers previously stuffed with tangled cables and dead batteries now held tubes of Desitin, wipes, and tiny nail clippers that looked more like surgical instruments than baby products. Baby shampoo and body wash appeared inside the bathroom mirror cabinet beside our toothbrushes and razors.

Jaidan hadn’t arrived yet, but you could already feel his quiet presence everywhere in the apartment.

Then, the following week, we got an email.

“We’re pleased to share that we are now able to offer a spot for your son,” read the first line from one of the daycares we had visited.

It felt bigger than an admissions letter from Columbia or NYU.

“We have a daycare!” Jaime yelled from across the apartment. “This is huge —we don’t have to panic about going back to work. And it’s the one we wanted! It’s right on the way to the train, so we can just drop him off on our way into the city.”

He kept going, increasingly animated as he paced through the living room.

“And I loved how intentional they were about making it queer-inclusive. Remember that other daycare where you asked if they had other same-sex couples and the woman looked completely confused? I mean, this is New York City, for crying out loud. How is that still happening?”

I nodded absently, but my eyes stayed fixed on the laptop screen.

Jaime stopped mid-sentence.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said slowly. “It’s just that they need us to submit our son’s full legal name in order to enroll him.”

For a second, neither of us said anything.

After years of paperwork, medical forms, legal documents, fertility clinics, court orders, airline reservations, insurance portals, and spreadsheets, it was somehow this daycare application that cornered us into finally making the decision permanent.

Jaime looked back at me and smiled.

“I guess we can’t call him Jaidan anymore.”