Motherhood: Day 7

Reading: I can't remember
Listening to: the quiet of my-baby's-not-hungry-just-yet
Outside: Hmm not sure. Dark?

 

Well it's time to explain my loooong absence.

 

I. Have had. My baby!

 

Go me!

 

I began my labor adventure at precisely three o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, November 19th, exactly two weeks and one day before my due date. After plenty of "surges" - a happier word for contractions - enough to stop my thoughts and breath if I didn't prepare myself for each one - and a nice relaxing dip in the waterbirth tub at Doncaster Women's Hospital, exactly eight hours and nineteen minutes later, Lena was born to the world. At 11:19 on 11/19. Wow!

 

I brought her up out of the water and stared and stared at this beautiful, impossible thing.

Congratulations from my husband and mother-in-law, well dones from the two midwives who were with me from start to finish all echoed softly against the walls of the birth suite.

 

Lena, born gently, blinked and took her first breath.

 

"I just had a baby!" I said, and the amazed laughter around me was like a song.

 

Thus started the first day of the rest of my life. Little baby girl, in my arms, the most beautiful thing I'd seen or imagined on earth.

 

Yes. Wow. And so now my sleep comes as little gifts of an hour here, two hours there. I exist in fuzzy pj's and I am wrapped up inside a baffling schedule of feeding, sterilizing, expressing, diaper changes, laundry, burping and the warm hugs of visitors.

 

My baby. My baby. My baby. Welcome to the world, Lena. All this is for you.

 

The first hour of life. I had only just met her, but it felt like I'd known her all along.