2014
The day I met Penny feels like forever ago, and also like yesterday.
The day before the day I met Penny was a Friday, and my hospital bag was not packed. I had a client appointment that day (yes, I was still working!) and was scrambling a bit to finish up ALL-THE-THINGS that weekend. My due date was on Monday, but I wasn’t too concerned– I was fairly convinced of two things: 1) My baby would be late. 2) My baby was a boy.
Apparently my ‘Mother’s Intuition’ is a bit off.
That night, Friday, Adam and I were sitting at home and I had the littlest, tiniest twinge in my very large belly. I hadn’t had any Braxton Hicks at all, so this was the first feeling I’d had that anything was different. So we packed the hospital bag. At 3am I woke up in the dark, and felt the first contractions. I didn’t wake Adam up for about a half hour, and then we called our doula a little while later.
Most of the rest of the day was spent at home, and I won’t go into detail… but as anyone who has gone through it knows: labour is not fun. I had a little app on my phone for tracking contractions, and at one point I was rating the strength at a 4/5. I realized later that those had probably been more like a 2.5. ;)
My contractions weren’t close enough together to ever warrant heading to the hospital, according to everything we had been told. We didn’t want to drive there and be turned away, so we stuck it out at home. Until things started to feel… different. I could tell this baby was on its way. Following this revelation was a harrowing drive to the hospital. When we arrived, I was wheel-chaired straight to a hospital room, and Penny was born about two hours later. Besides the scary drive, everything really went just about as well as it could have– and we didn’t even have to wait for a room! Bonus. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the hospital before and not had to wait.
I was so grateful for our doula, Allison, that day. I don’t think I would ever want to give birth without having a doula there, and I would recommend it to everyone and anyone. It was that amazing. She helped me to try different things, listen to my body, and made me feel like everything was going so well and normally (Which it was! But it doesn’t always feel that way). Not to say that Adam wasn’t amazing too: But almost everyone has a spouse/go-to person there, and most people don’t have a doula. :)
I have a little baby book for Penny, and one of the questions was to choose a word to describe how you felt right when your baby was born. Adam’s was ‘Joy’. Which is beautiful, and perfect. Mine was… ‘Relief’. I didn’t feel that immediate surge of love and all that. Mostly, I felt so happy that labour was over. The love and the joy came just a little later, when all of those wonderful hormones started to kick in. :)
It feels so strange to say that I’m a ‘mom’ now: I don’t feel any different really, only a little more tired (Penny sleeps quite well so far, but babies are just exhausting by nature I think!), a little more terrified (less and less every day, but I think there will always be this incredible sense of worry), a little less clean (I find myself perma-covered in some sort of milk or spit-up) and a lot more proud (how can you be proud of a little human who doesn’t do much but eat and poop and sleep? You just are.)
Is everything how I thought it would be? Yes and no. Those first few weeks were more tiring that I thought they’d be. Finding time to work between her naps is a little harder than I thought it would be. But the biggest thing that I didn’t realize or expect is how even at a few days old, Penny was very much her own person. You can say she looks like Adam or I (she looks like Adam!), but when I stare at her and she stares back at me, I see a new little person who isn’t exactly like either of us, and isn’t like anyone who ever was before or will be after. It’s quite something to look into the eyes of someone that came from you, and not see yourself at all, but someone completely new. It’s really a little miracle.
