Saturday 28 February 2015

Where to begin?

I've showered and had a reasonable amount of sleep. The house isn't horrifically messy. We're ordering in take-out and Jeremy's out for an hour or so. I've a sleeping baby strapped to me in the carrier, there's music playing and a glass of wine waiting. For the first time in 6 weeks I'm able to write.

In many ways I've been writing all of these 6 weeks, narrating everything in my head and trying to pin down words to describe the indescribable. Because never has there been so much material or so little time or energy to get anything down. 

So, where to begin? 

At some point I'll write about the labour, which has faded somewhat in my memory but I made sure I jotted down notes soon after to be able to recall everything - the names of our amazing nurses; the icky uncomfortable leakiness following my waters breaking and me being confined to bed, hooked up to monitors and an IV (I was induced); the excruciating accuracy of the term 'ring of fire'; the bewilderment Jeremy and I both felt when left in a room on our own with a tiny baby, waiting for them to come back and tell us exactly what to do. I'll write about all of that, perhaps, soon. Each thing is probably it's own post, although I'll spare you one about leaky discomfort.  

I'll also write about the wonder and the way the world shifted. The moment I realised I had to stop waiting for a proper night's sleep and the heart rending joy of watching my husband become a father. 

And then there's the help we had in the early weeks - my mum bringing me toast, cut up apple, and coffee while I tried to reconcile the fact of another day beginning after 3 hours of sleep. There's watching my parents fall in love with their grandson. Watching my sister snuggle with him. 

And breastfeeding! I could write a book about breastfeeding. It'd probably scare most people off of it. It's OK now but oh my gosh how desperate those early days felt. They need to tell women that - that when they say it's 'hard at first', they mean it's the most heartbreaking thing you've ever experienced. Pretty much everyone I've spoken to so far since remembers this. They just failed to tell me before hand. Or maybe it's not possible to be told. 

Because certainly it's not possible to explain this Love. It's too much in some ways, in most ways. Like if you'd known ahead of time what it'd really be like, maybe you wouldn't have chosen it... except that once you know you're already locked in and there's no way you'd choose anything else. I remember a point immediately after delivery when they were washing and weighing him and I was sat there, exhausted, examining my emotions (I'm me, of course I was analyzing my emotions) and wondering if I'd felt the 'Wave Of Overwhelming Love' yet. And then I realised that I now came second to myself - that this screaming sticky creature, who I'd only held for a brief second, had laid claim not just to my heart but to my everything. That he was going to come first no matter what. That I'd die to protect him. The wave of love came later, when I was singing to him to comfort him, a song that I'd sung often during pregnancy, and he stopped crying immediately and I started crying instead, because here he was. 

So there's nowhere to begin, really. And some of this (most of this?) probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I'm starting to try to unjumble it where possible. 

In summary though, we're fine and he's amazing. It's not easy, of course, and it's not always pretty. There's been a fair amount of tears, mostly at 3am, but there's joy too. Hopefully this marks the start of me being able to write more often and I can start to unpick it all a bit more thoroughly. 

We're still doing cloth diapers by the way. Mostly. 

Wednesday 11 February 2015

How am I doing?

If you've asked me how I'm doing over the past few days I will have told you I'm fine. Sometimes I may have added in a bit more detail, othertimes not. I appreciate your asking (really!) but I'm so darn bored with the answer that even saying 'I'm fine' can be hard to choke out. I wish I had something more interesting to say - like 'I'm in acute pain every 5 minutes for 1 minute long stretches and have been for the past hour'. That'd be much more interesting to report. Although chances are I'd be ignoring your texts by then. I'm not the best at talking about myself - I prefer to hear about other people and ask rather than answer questions. But here I am at 41 weeks pregnant (which has to be 10 months by anyone's counting, right?) and I feel like I'm been watched warily like an unexploded bomb. Heck, I'm watching myself like an unexploded bomb. A big one that ate all the cake. Even my spam email is taunting me, since 'Destination Maternity' and whoever else they sold my data to knows my due date and is now asking me what the first week of motherhood has been like.

I actually don't really know quite how I am. I'm not massively uncomfortable - a bit, but not ridiculously so... and for the most part I've been sleeping OK. It's just the mental element that's doing me in. This will go down as one of the strangest weeks of my life, where I have done very little and yet every moment has carried with it a weight of anticipation paired with the anticlimax of the moment before when I didn't go into labour after all. 

The snow and predicted snow isn't helping my brain. Even when it's not currently falling and the roads are passable, it makes me feel trapped. Poor Jeremy shoveled the roof snow onto our deck and there's now an actual ski mountain outside our back door. A non pregnant me might consider making it into a sledding hill. The pregnant me just looks and laments and eats mini-eggs. 

So it's just me and the cat, netflix and mini eggs... which isn't all that bad really. In fact it's pretty amazing, or it should be and would be if I could stop trying to think myself into labour. 

By Monday we can all stop watching me because by Monday they'll have induced me and he'll be here (or by Tuesday morning at the latest if I'm in for a long'un). For once I'm thankful I live in America 'cause in England this could be allowed to continue for another 2 weeks and by then I might actually have gone insane. 




Tuesday 10 February 2015

Due Date + 1

We're at due date + 1 and no baby, which isn't massively surprising but it is weird to think that the date I've been reciting for 9 months has now lost all significance.

Snow just keeps on falling and Jeremy is currently up on the flat part of the roof, shoveling. A part of me wishes I could help but a bigger part is very happy I can't.

And I'm just waiting. Waiting for this baby to arrive (or the process of arrival to begin - if only storks delivering babies was a real thing) and for our lives to change. I've found myself feeling something close to sad or nostalgic for our child-free life together - for it just being me and him and the cat. I remember feeling something similar right before I got married. A strange feeling of sadness and loss as I gave up being just a daughter and took on being a wife also. And now of course I'm taking on 'mother' as well as wife and daughter. When it happened before our wedding - the knowledge of this change - it took me by surprise and I felt it like a shock of grief. Now it's more of a known feeling and I know that the gain will outweigh the loss. I know that Love is not a finite thing, and it'll grow to accommodate this baby so that Jeremy and the cat and my family won't feel any reduction in my love for them - that if anything it'll grow for everyone. That's a miraculous thing right there.

But when I woke at 5am this morning to pee and then lay waiting to fall back asleep, listening to Jeremy's sleeping breathing with the cat curled up at his feet, I had to acknowledge the passing of this time where it is just us. Almost to mourn it in some small way. Where I'm not listening for anything else or checking on anyone... where my world seems to be contained within one sleeping bed.

I'll miss it, even as I know I also won't.

Tuesday 3 February 2015

On time

Pregnancy takes so long. Time creeps forward and everyone tells you how quickly it's going and they're delusional because time hasn't moved this slowly since secondary school maths on a Monday afternoon. 

And then, suddenly, it's over. 


Or pretty much over anyway. The next week or so may be the longest yet, but there's this weird anticipation hanging around. Life is going to change any moment now - so many hypotheticals are going to be proven true or false or insane. We're going to have to tell people his name. He's no longer going to be kicking my bladder or doing whatever it is he's been doing to my rib-cage. Life as we know it could literally change entirely right now. 


Or now. 


Or now. 


(It didn't, but it could, and it will on one of these nows, one of these days)


Weird. 

On sleep

I sleep at the edge, in the suburbs, on the skin of sleep. I sleep knowing the blissful depths beneath me, unable to swim down. And then I’m awake and if I’m awake then I need to pee because I always need to pee and then I’m bobbing around in some pretense of sleep again and then it’s morning. And I wonder if it’s nature’s way of preparing me for what’s coming / making the transition easier, or if it’s just mean and horrible. Probably mean and horrible.



Monday 2 February 2015

On most things

On Nesting:
People/books/blogs say that around this time the body knows the baby is coming soon so you get an urge to ‘nest’. Bollocks. There’s a flipping date in the calendar – my brain knows the baby is coming soon and there’s a great long list of things to do before our house/lives are even a bit ready for an infant. And the list keeps getting longer. Every time I cross something off, I think of something new. Also, I’m not sure that ‘nesting’ is supposed to mean tearing-the-nest-apart-and-building-a-new-one, because that’s pretty much what we’ve been up to the past few weeks. There was a point last week when all our bedroom furniture was in the dining room and I knew that if Alan were to choose that moment to arrive, I’d prefer Jeremy to be home cleaning than with me at the hospital.

On Tronald:
 As predicted, the cat thinks that all the new baby stuff is just interesting / comfy new places to sleep. Hopefully all the exploring will be done by the time Alan is actually here… hopefully Alan will not be considered a comfy new place to sleep.

On working:
After today, assuming Alan isn’t early, I have 5 more days in the office. That’s still too many days, but it used to be 46 days so if I can do 41 I can do the remaining 5... more or less. I’m not massively uncomfortable most of the time except after sitting at my desk for 5 hours at which point my feet and ankles swell up like I’m on an airplane and whatever trousers I’m wearing forget they’re supposed to be maternity trousers. At this point I normally just give up and go home.

On ‘sleeping’:
I wonder if it’s nature’s way of preparing me for what’s coming / making the transition easier, or if it’s just mean and horrible. I sleep on the very edge of what’s possible with sleep, on the very skin of sleep, at times painfully aware that I can’t swim down into the depths, that I need to bob around on the surface . And then I’m awake and if I’m awake then I need to pee because I always need to pee and then I’m bobbing around in some pretense of sleep again and then it’s morning. But I seem to be able to bear it better than I would have before, so maybe there’s some hope in there.


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The animals in my wood

One of the various impractical things I’m doing to prepare for Alan’s arrival is to draw a series of animals, using oil pastels, with the idea that we’ll frame them and have them up in the nursery and that he and I will look at them and have engaging ‘conversations’ about what the animals are doing / thinking / considering doing. I’m drawing ‘woodland creatures’ and, if I’m honest, this is largely inspired by Colin Dann’s Animals of Farthing Wood series although so far ‘Fox’ is the only main character I’ve attempted and otherwise I just have some of the lesser characters (frog / rabbit / mouse) and I don’t think any of those actually made it all the way to White Deer Park so I should probably think about doing Kestrel, Badger and Adder if I actually want it to pay true homage to the series.

Anyway.  Woodland creatures is a pretty clear mandate, right? We all know what counts as a woodland creature. Except that Jeremy’s suggestions have included ‘Bear’, ‘Raccoon’, ‘Possum’ and ‘Skunk’ and I am reminded that here in America the woods are a little more hazardous and smelly . I could bend to the fact that I’m raising my son in a country where foxes are not at the top of the food chain (we’re ignoring people) and allow that, here, bears live in the woods.

 I could, but I’m not going to.


Overall it’s a battle I’ve already lost, but at least I get to say what animals are allowed in my wood. 

Sunday 1 February 2015

Bullet Points of Things

  • Almost nine whole months of not drinking alcohol, including being designated driver during a tour of French wineries and forgoing the obligatory G&Ts on the beach in Maine, and this last month has been by far the hardest. Winter needs warming up and Mulled Wine is the perfect way to do this. Hot Chocolate certainly has it's place and has been used as a substitute with no regard to calories, but it's not the same as Mulled Wine unless spiked with baileys. Christmas parties, family gatherings, new years celebrations...all are made exponentially easier by alcohol. If my son ever questions my love and commitment to him, I shall point to the winter of 2014/15 as Ultimate Proof. 

  • I've got to a point with all the pregnancy questions and baby care advice that I can no longer hear anything anyone says. It just comes out as a deafening hush of white noise while I smile and nod automatically. I've seriously considered wearing a sign around my neck that reads "February 7th. Tired but fine. Boy. Very excited. Not telling you the name." I'm such an asshole. 

  • I think we have the name but Jeremy won't commit to saying it's definitely the name even though there are no other options in sight and it took us a billion years to come up with this one. It's kind of unusual and we found it not in a baby book but on a park bench (as an inscription, not random graffiti). It's not Trucker. 

  • We have an ultrasound next week where they may or may not decide if I need to have a C-Section or not (low placenta that goes around the back and is sneaky and hard to determine if it's where it needs to be or not). Most of me wants it all to be natural and not to be immobilized and cut open (although if I have to be cut open, being immobilized sounds good) but the control freak in me would LOVE to have a date and time all of this is going down. Also it'd make booking my parents' flights over from the UK a heck of a lot simpler. 

  • We've been canning soups and stews in preparation for easy healthy meals once Alan arrives. This level of organization is not reflected anywhere else in our lives and probably says a lot about where our priorities lie.