On my clothes this summer have been blueberries, blackberries,
peanut butter,
and other marks from the mouth of my baby daughter,
"Textbook" has been the word that keeps coming to mind as I learn new things about pregnancy, birth, and babyhood. Before finding out I was pregnant, I thought it might be difficult or a particularly long wait to have children. It wasn't.
I had a textbook pregnancy that started with textbook symptoms and ended with a textbook labor. As the experience progressed, I kept repeating the word "textbook" to myself like a mantra, reminding myself that my experience would probably be statistically sound, the middle of each bell curve, nothing to worry about.
Our story is not harrowing, and I'm so grateful.
Tessa is continuing the progression by hitting the teeny milestones to the day. Born exactly a week after her due date, she has grown within the center margins, she cluster fed at week three for 48 hours, which almost did me in, which is also normal. She smiled at week five-and-a-half, and cluster fed at week six for 48 hours.
I give thanks to God for each normal day, each one both ordinary in a textbook and extraordinary to me.
We have a daughter!
We have a daughter, can you believe it!?
She has big, trusting eyes, and Jake and I both swear she's smiled at us sometime in the last week, her fifth week of life outside the womb.
Almost as unbelievable is that I went through labor.
I labored at home from 1 AM to 10:30 AM, supported by Jake and our doula, then finally knelt on the backseat while Jake drove us to the hospital. There's a story in there I'd like to tell elsewhere, but this is the quick version. When we arrived at the labor and delivery room, we were surrounded by a team of health workers, asking questions, getting measurements, taking blood, testing for Covid-19. Contractions were on top of each other by then, so I don't remember a lot of that. The midwife said I was measuring at 6 centimeters when we arrived at 11:30.
By 12-something I was at 8 centimeters. I could not stand it anymore, though. I was in the thick of labor, throwing up and doing all sorts of things that I won't narrate to you. I was losing my concentration, getting scared, and I said so, "I'm afraid! I'm afraid! What do I do?" The nurse to my left kept coaching me to breathe out the contraction, breathe it out. The doctor offered an epidural, and I said, "yes, I want that!"
Jake reminded me that my goal had been to go unmedicated, a goal I made so I could recover quickly. I said I wanted the epidural. The doc had already called for the anesthesiologist, then measured dilation one more time. He said in a monotone way that I was at 10 centimeters. I recognized that as the golden number! Why was no one celebrating? "That's good, right!?" I said somehow. I was already pushing. A knock at the door and the anesthesiologist was sent away by a nurse, who said, "we're going to have the baby instead. Thanks!"
Pushing felt almost like a relief after the last two hours of ever-more-intense work. Five pushes brought Theresa into the daylight!
They whisked her away because of a meconium scare, and Jake followed to the other side of the room to see our baby. He returned to my side, all awonder. I was shivering a lot, and worried about shivering, having never heard of it happening, and worried that something had happened to our baby. I had to ask a distracted Jake, and he told me about our Theresa, that she was fine and perfect as could be, and I shivered in joy as they stitched me up.
We had been in the hospital for about an hour and a half before she was born. And so our new life has begun.
I don't have big events happening right now as I wait for our child to be born, maybe this week, maybe today. But I'm dying to write something down, anything, because I go back through my blog every now and then and wonder at the long silences: wasn't anything happening? The truth is, a sea change is taking place, but it's so quiet, there's no event to narrate, no pithy interactions with strangers to laugh at later.
So I went back through my Google Photos and chose a month and year at random to think and write about. From this exercise, February 1, 2015, I found pictures of a baby dedication! It seems fitting.
Maya, Josh, Nora, Andre, and Henry were being dedicated that day. They are all chubby-cheeked and beyond cute. Maya has these perfectly-shaped eyes and she stares off into the congregation from her father's arms, seeing her larger family from a new vantage. Josh, only a few months old, has his thick hair parted in the middle and is dressed in a dapper baby suit, complete with tie and pocket square. Nora looks at the Pastor with some curiosity at his touching her head, but is maybe ready to believe it is a blessing. Andre's mom, Janelle, holds him close and he looks positively angelic, even if half his face is covered by his pacifier. Henry might be the most baby-looking of them all, for some reason. His duck-fluff hair is barely settled on his sweet, round head. He is wide-eyed and alert, but quietly sitting in his father's arms, facing outward.
These little babies are a bunch of five-year-olds now! I see them on their parents' Instagram and on Zoom and through the occasional email; they're doing wonderful things like holding snakes, going to school, making friends in new places, learning to feed their baby brother. I hope I never underestimate seeing kids growing up close ever again. It broke my heart when I returned from Morocco, the growing I had missed seeing weekly and monthly at church. And now! The pandemic separates us, and our recent move, and several months, and in one case, an ocean, and I tell you, digital messages are something, but they're nothing compared to looking around the room at West End Church, and seeing each little kid troop in from Sunday School with their sticker sheets to sit with their families not quietly. I miss you and your kids, West End. So much.
