Birth and Rebirth

It is May 31st, 2020 and I am watching the news at 6pm with my partner. I’m only half watching as the latest numbers dead from the virus is announced. My mind is preoccupied, constantly, as it has been for forty weeks. As I look down at my pregnant belly, immense and ripe enough to drop like an apple, emotions come filtering down through my mind. Like dappled autumn light they hover, each thought distinguished from the others yet none have any strength. Fear. It’s there, ominous and clever. Fear of giving birth of course. But another, the fear of being a mother. I can not honestly say I love my baby yet. I don’t know how I feel at all, except perhaps there is a sense of detachment for now. Doubt. I doubt very much that I’ll be a good mother. I lost my own mother at eight years old. Her cancer ripped my world apart and my childhood fled before my eyes and in its place crouched a dark new being composed of loss and wilderness. I do not know how to be a mother. How do I hold this baby, his entire world in my hands and guide him through this terrifying world so that he is not alone? Hope. I think I see it, further off, a faint star. Is there always hope? I hope that labor will not kill me, that the baby, my baby, will be well and that I will love him. He kicks inside me and I feel the thrill of the unknown, always accompanied by the oppressive weight of doubt and fear. My belly ripples and moves as he stretches out inside me and I look with wonder at what my body has accomplished. He is late, by three days. Does this mean he’ll get too big and I’ll have more pain? Is he ok in there? I am so afraid. His birth has felt like an eternity in the making and somehow it still feels like it will never happen. The imminence and unavoidable truth of it is almost surreal.

When I realise I am bleeding we speak to a midwife at the hospital and she tells us to come in. I have never heard of spontaneous labor before but I am told that is what is happening as I have no break between my contractions. My baby is ‘back to back’ they say, that is the source of the added constant torment. Within two hours I am in an abstract living nightmare. At any moment I feel as though my mind could crack open and everything that makes me a conscious being will float away and darkness will wrap its shadowed cloak around me. I say two words only in the space of the three hours that feel like an infinity of wheeling sky. “Help me.” An epidural brings some relief, the pain is eased. But they bring a slowing of things and I have the time again to be afraid. When it is decided twelve hours later that I will have an emergency Caesarean section I look at a photograph of my mother and I feel hot tears sting my tired eyes. In theatre my partner is wonderful. Every person is wonderful, from the midwife to the anaesthetist to the surgeon. The endless patience of my partner is so needed as I ask “am I still ok?” every thirty seconds. “You’re absolutely fine honey” he will say and squeeze my hand. It may be obvious by now that I am an anxious person.

The surgeon says “here we go”, my partner says “he must be out honey” and for the space of a single second I do not breathe. I cease to be. It cannot be undone, he is in the world now and I must face this new life. I am spiralling in doubt and fear. I am not capable, not ready. Then there is a sound, it tears from inside two tiny lungs and rents the air around me. His cry, before I have even seen his face, splits my trembling heart in two and a love pours forth with the natural force of a raging storm. I cannot believe it. It is the sweetest, most beautiful sound I have heard in all the world and somehow it makes me whole. An insurrection of a sort takes place. An overthrowing of the self doubt that has governed my mind since he was little more than a collection of tiny cells. I am a mother. I am flesh, bone, strength and nature.

The rest of 2020 is a whirlwind of ups, downs, learning and love. Being me, I worry about everything. Is he happy? Is there such a thing as too much love? Will he ever sleep in his own bed? Am I weaning him properly? I already think about him when he’s older and I am gone and I wonder if he will be ok or if he will feel lost, as I once was. I think of him being unhappy. I think of something terrible happening to him and how I would not recover.

Now it is 2021. I have a resolution. I am going to live in the light of acceptance. There are things I cannot change and things that I must just get through with perseverance. To think on all these things that may never come to pass is like a plague on the mind. It detracts. It diminishes. Free myself from these worries and I can live purely in the enjoyment of my beautiful baby boy and the greatest love I’ll ever know.