The wave with all the love

Loving W is a curious thing. I'm not sure if it came upon me as a wave as much as a tide - one that's coming up and up and carrying me with it. (And, presumably, isn't going to recede otherwise this is a crappy metaphor for parental love). At first it was instinctive - the biting knowledge that I now came second to me, that he came first. It was responsibility and need and nature. I didn't know him, but I loved him.

Now I know him, or I know as much as there is to know so far. I know he loves the sky and will watch it with wonder. I know he loves my face and that he really objects to being woken up. I know he makes the very best faces when he's waking up. I know he likes it when Jeremy shaves or that he doesn't like being kissed when Jeremy doesn't. He's currently entirely indifferent to the cat, which is just as well because the cat is entirely indifferent to him. He is strong and big and we think he'll walk before he crawls. He's very very noisy. He much prefers being upright to lying down and isn't the biggest fan of sleeping for long stretches. He has the best smile and seems interested in books, although I might just be wishing that on him. He loves food and that there was ever a time when we worried about his weight or if he was getting enough milk seems utterly ludicrous. His eyes are the bluest grey or the greyest blue.

And I still wonder why we do this to ourselves, while also knowing there is no other way. I wonder if we'd still have done this had we known, while knowing that of course we would, or that it's all of a mootness anyway since now we know. Not the sleeplessness or the fact that everything I wear is spit up on before I finish my coffee in the morning, or even the craving I sometimes get for time alone, time to do something other than the basics, time to be separate and just me even though there is no just me anymore. But the fact that when you love this much you also allow the potential for sorrow and loss and a profound unmitigable (not a word) anxiety into your world. You welcome it in because with it comes joy and the best smiles and the bluest greyest eyes. It's insanity and yet there is no other way.

sleep

All through pregnancy there were questions everybody asked every time and I got tired, so tired, of answering. The questions bored me to actual tears and I used to avoid the office kitchen at times just to escape telling another person how I was feeling and when I was due.

The question everybody asks now he's here is "how are you sleeping?" But instead of groaning with boredom at the question, I want to answer. I want to talk and analyse and strategise - like when you first meet someone and all you want to do is talk about them and ponder their every move. That is how I feel about sleep right now. I miss it all the time. I think about it all the time. I wonder if it's ever going to call and I stare at the phone (the metaphorical sleep phone) and wait for it to ring.

And sometimes it does ring. Not often or predictably. Not enough for me to get comfortable and to rely on it. But sometimes, I get to sleep for more than 2 hours. Sometimes I get to sleep lying down. Sometimes I get to sleep when not holding a snortling infant at the same time and hearing a chorus of baby books judging me for lying down in bed with my baby boy instead of making sure he's not actually asleep before I put him down flat on his back so that he can learn to put himself to sleep (they clearly have never met an infant in their whole lives).

Oh my dearie me I miss sleep.

The good news is that baby is sleeping just fine, provided he's being snuggled or rocked or nursed or driven or walked with...

post breast-feeding snooze.

An attempt to put him down after he fell asleep in the sling. He woke up about 2 minutes later. 

Out and about snooze

Sleeping position of choice, if only mean old mummy could hold him like this all night long. 

Bloody good job he's so darn cute.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.