She asked how the delivery went and if "it was love at first sight."
It wasn't.
Labor was long. My blood pressure was raised, bordering on preeclampsia. I had a scheduled induction set for week 37. We went in early Monday morning, they hooked me up and got the pitocin rolling. I took an epidural only because I was unsure of when the contractions would actually start to hurt. Everything was progressing...until it wasn't. I spent over an hour in a plank/downward dog hybrid wiggling my hips to Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," trying to get mister baby to flip around and swim back down.
We waited until it was no longer viable to wait.
They prepped me for c-section. I cried. I shivered. I counted the lights on the ceiling as they sawed into me. And then, like Rafiki hoisting Simba into the air, my doctor held a splotchy, gelatin, swollen creature in the air, and I thought, "Aren't babies supposed to be cute? What have I made?"
They cleaned him and wrapped him, and his looks improved significantly, but it wasn't love at first sight. It wasn't magical. It was odd, bewildering, foreign, relieving to be over, curious, strange. Different.
And that's okay.
I needed time to get to know this tiny guy. To bond. To talk to him. To count his fingers and toes. To watch his eyelids flutter while he slept. To know the paralyzing fear parenthood brings upon you, as you place your hand on the baby to check that he is still breathing, multiple times throughout the night.
I needed to heal from a pregnancy that, while very much planned and anticipated, wreaked havoc on my body.
Through this, I have learned there's no one size fits all reaction to being thrust into parenthood.
And that's okay, and you may not know it now, but if this is you, too, you will be okay, eventually.
You will be okay.
I'm glad you write. I'm even glader that You share it.
ReplyDelete