I remember feeling that it couldn’t be happening. I just didn’t have the energy. I was going in for an emergency Cesarean and I’d had the pre-med. It felt like I was about to climb mount Everest but had not taken on board the seriousness of the task and got drunk before setting off. I wanted to sleep and I wanted everyone to go home and switch the tv and big light off on the way out. It all sounded far too much trouble for my liking. There was another month to go, let me go back to sleep. But of course I had to keep my end up, there were lots of people getting involved in all this. It was dead serious.
I had this little green wall of material in front of me. So I couldn’t see what they were up to in my belly. I felt no pain until near the end when they started washing up in there, but it was worth it.
She was a tiny 3lb 4oz and the scariest but most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. There is no way to really explain the first time you see your baby for the first time. It’s a bit like a dream that you think you’ll wake up from, only you never do. Your whole life changes after that. You no longer come first, and never will again. Your child does. You’re on a different road now.
She spent four weeks in the special care unit. The first few days connected to bleeping machines, that went off every now and again and a nurse would rush in. I was never scared for her, I knew she would be fine in a way that’s impossible to define. I just knew.
Like many new babies she had to go under the lights for jaundice. I could see them through the window from my room in Airedale Hospital. She was such a little tiny thing, the size of her dad’s hand. It was like a week in a dream of hospital food and walking down the corridor to be with such a tiny being. And staring at her photo in the hopes of bringing milk. A method used when you cannot be with your newborn.
21 years later I still look in wonder at what her dad and I conjured up. Like magic. Something precious and extremely valuable, miraculous and beautiful.