A very belated announcement

As you’ve probably guessed, a lot has happened since my last post. Namely, we had a baby girl!  Our lives were forever blessed and enriched at 11:26pm on July 30th with the arrival of sweet little Madeleine Cecile.  She is just over two months old now, which I guess marks the amount of time that it has taken me to get into the swing of things and get organized enough to pop on here to share the news. Of course, by now, most of you already knew all of this, but several of you have expressed that you were excited to read my next blog post. I’m guessing this is not for the news, but more for the story behind the news. So here it is:

If you have been following this blog, you know that I had a very anti-climactic due date.  The day came and nothing happened. The nothing-happening-ness lasted for a full 7 days until I had to go in for an ultrasound to determine whether I would need to be induced.  As it turned out, I was getting low on amniotic fluid, so the doctors determined that induction was necessary.  Since I was already 3cm dilated, I was told that I would be induced that day, and that I would not be going home until I had my baby. Even though I had been waiting for this day to come for what felt like an eternity, the news that I would be having the baby that day came as a huge shock.  I did not really leave my house that morning thinking that the next time I would come home would be with my daughter.  Also, J was at work that morning, so I think that receiving this news all by myself compounded its emotional impact.  In the next few hours, J arrived, we settled into our room, and we had some pre-induction lunch (taco wraps!).  The nurses told me that the induction would start at about 3pm, and that people react differently to the petocin, but that if I was lucky, I would have the baby by the next morning, if not definitely by the afternoon the next day.

A note on labor and expectations: I should pause here to say that throughout my entire pregnancy, my hope was that I would not have to be induced. I had heard that the pain caused by induced contractions was much stronger and much more intense than natural contractions. This is partly because when the body goes into labor on its own, there is a natural progression in the pain, whereas when it is induced, the intensity of the pain increases much less gradually.  I had also heard that because of this, women who are induced are much less likely to give birth without the epidural – something I had been hoping to try.

Anyhow, all this to say, that I really had to let go of any expectations I had had, and be open to whatever experience I was about to encounter. As I had been told many times, you can hope and plan for your perfect labor experience, but at the end of the day, you really do not know what is going to happen, and you have to be flexible. So flexible I was. I consciously let go of any hopes and expectations surrounding the experience, and decided to embrace whatever was about to happen – because really, what matters most was that I would soon (God willing), be meeting my baby!

The induction (a petocin drip) started at about 3pm, and the dose was gradually increased every half hour.  J and I would go for walks in between. My doctor came in the room at 5pm only to see me chatting and laughing away with J and my dad – meaning, still no pain and no labor.  It is at this point where he said to me “I am going to come back at 8pm, and if you are still laughing then, you won’t be after I break your waters”.  Eep – ok.  Sure enough, my doctor came back at 8:00, and I still had not experienced any pain.  So, just as he had promised, he ‘broke my waters’, and almost immediately the contractions started – and boy were they intense. They were not joking when they said that it would not be gradual. My doctor said that he would be back at 11pm to assess my progress. At this point I was still 3cm.

I labored for a few hours with the help and support of J and my doula, and at around 10pm, the pain just became unbearable. I had been coached to breathe in between contractions, but at this point, the pain had become constant; I felt the same between contractions as I did during the contractions. It is at this point where I wanted to give up. I couldn’t bear it anymore – I asked for the epidural. I was exhausted and was foreseeing another 10 hours or so of this pain. Not to mention that I had been told that morning that my baby would weigh around 9lbs! Little did I know that I had just entered the ‘transition’ and most intense phase of labor that comes just prior to the pushing. The nurse then came in to tell me that the anesthetist was in surgery and that I would have to wait until he was finished to get the epidural.   At this point, I honestly did not think I was going to be able to do it, and I wanted to give up and back out. But I couldn’t. There was no choice – had to keep going.  THEN, at about 10:45pm, as if the baby knew I had reached my limit, I felt her coming.  I remember yelling “SHE’S COMING” and having everyone gather around me shocked and excited that everything was happening so quickly. The nurses instructed me on how to push, and I have to say, I was terrified. I felt the same way that I felt that morning when they told me I wasn’t going home until the baby was born.  Anyhow, it ended up being only about half an hour until I was holding little Madeleine in my arms, and felt more joy than I had ever felt in my entire life.  The feeling of holding her on my chest after that whole experience, and after having carried her for all those months, was surreal and so miraculous.  After all the little twists and turns, I had the most amazing and empowering birth experience, and little Madeleine had such a beautiful beginning to what I hope will be an even more beautiful life.  J and I are still in awe of her and we are just loving staring at her and watching her grow. More stories coming soon!

Waiting…

So baby girl is 4 days late so far, though it feels like so much more since I was told to be ready ahead of the due date.  She did not come early though, and when the due date finally arrived it was pretty anti-climactic.  The last few weeks, but especially the last week were strange. I would wake up every day not knowing if that day would be “the day”. Similarly, I would make plans, not knowing if I would be able to keep them or not.  I suppose we never really know what’s around the corner, but these past few weeks have been especially suspenseful. I have found that in the midst of this, I have started to feel a little more overwhelmed by the world. Reading the news has affected me in a way that it never did before. I really feel like I can’t handle hearing too much news, or too much bad news, at once. This was never a problem for me. I have also found myself overwhelmed by technology and needing to take a lot more breaks from my phone than I used to. I’m not sure if this will be a permanent change, or something that is just temporary during this time, but nonetheless, it has been interesting to observe this change.

More than anything else though, these past few weeks have been strange because they have really been reminding me of the last big event I experienced: the loss of my mother.  In the days and weeks leading up to my mother’s going to heaven I felt many of the same emotions that I have felt lately.  To be clear, those days were amongst the saddest and hardest of my life, while these days are of course amongst the happiest. Nonetheless, it is interesting how the feelings of suspense and uncertainty have presented themselves in the same way in these two polar opposite life events.  In the days leading up to my mom’s passing, I went to bed not knowing if my life would be changing in a major way the next day. My mind could not comprehend how life would possibly go on without my mom and every minute of every day felt so precious. Now, I feel similar emotions, but in the opposite way. Again, I go to bed wondering if I will be meeting my baby girl the next day. And again, my mind is just not able to wrap itself around this life change. Losing a mom and gaining a daughter are just two things that you really cannot imagine until they happen. And even then, they are still both very hard to understand fully.

I think the experience of loosing my mother has made the pregnancy journey that much more interesting because I feel like I am experiencing it all over again — but in reverse.  In the first instance, I slowly said goodbye to the most influential person in my life, as well as to the role in life that I played as her daughter. I slowly learned to adapt to life without her physically here. And now, in the second instance, through this pregnancy, I slowly started preparing to meet a person who will soon play a very central part in my life, and when she arrives, I will learn to adapt to a life with her physically here. Again, I will need to learn to adapt to a whole new role in life; that of a mother.

The circle of life kind of amazes me.

Some notes on pregnancy…

Hard to believe, that I have reached the end of my pregnancy. I am 5 (FIVE!!) days away from my due date and haven’t popped on here to tell you anything about how it has gone.  So – here are the highlights:

1-I have LOVED being pregnant! Not only has it been an absolute privilege and honour to carry around this little miracle in my womb, but I have felt so uplifted and encouraged by the way people respond to pregnant ladies. My experience has been nothing but positive. I have experienced people slowing down their cars and rolling down their windows to tell me I look great, a stranger on the street giving me his umbrella in a storm, as well as random smiles and encouraging words on the streets. I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t expect this. Every day when I open the newspapers, I read about all the horrible things that people do to one another, and yet, pregnancy, and the excitement of an unborn child really seems to bring out the best in everyone.

2-The past 9 months have been a true journey of personal discovery for me. J and I took a wonderful birth preparation class called ‘Your power, your birth’.  Along with learning a whole lot about the birthing process (which I knew virtually nothing about before!), I also learned to see my pregnancy as a journey to motherhood. My daily experiences began to be framed through this lens.  I’ll give you an example. I had an unfortunate situation in my workplace where I faced a fork in the road. In short: fight for my rights or put my head down and allow others to walk all over me.  When I put it this way, the choice seems obvious, however in the moment, making the right choice was not so obvious. I had people tell me that the best thing to do was to avoid any sort of stress on my baby – which was good advice, but which ultimately, was not what I needed to do. After some thought, I realised that if I was going to bring a little girl (oh yeah – it’s a girl!) into this world, I needed to be able to show her how to stand up for herself. And if I couldn’t do that for myself, then I would have no credibility when it came time for me to teach her that lesson.  And so – that growing little spaghetti squash in my stomach became the inspiration and the lens through which I made that decision and many others over the last few months.

So – when it came time to create a ‘birthing bundle’ in our pre-natal class, here is what I did:

The assignment was to put together 3 objects: one that symbolizes the women in your family and the power that they bring to your upcoming birthing process, one that symbolizes your partner (if applicable), and one that symbolizes you and your baby working together. Here is my bundle:

For the strength from the women in my family, I selected this cross, given to me by my mother, symbolizing the Christian faith held by my mother, my mother in law, my sister and my grandmother, all of which have been inspiring to me throughout my life.

To symbolize my husband, I selected his wedding ring.  If you look closely, you will see that the inside layer of his ring is made of rose gold, surrounded by a tough layer of titanium.  When he had this ring made, he was thinking that the delicate rose gold layer symbolized me, while the second layer hugging and protecting it, while being exposed to the elements, would symbolize him and his role in our lives. The two layers in the ring symbolize a marriage union of us as two separate, yet combined layers. I could not think of a better partner and source of support for what is to come.

Last, but not least, to symbolize my baby and I working together, I selected the wooden salad fork and spoon set that I brought back from South Africa a few years ago. If you look closely, the spoon is more weathered than the fork. So, the spoon is me, and the fork is baby girl. I viewed us a separate, but still working together. As the ‘womb’ I ‘spoon’ feed her and our nutritional intake is one and the same. As the newer and less weathered fork, baby ‘prods’ me, and impacts my decisions and outlook on life.

3-Throughout this journey I’ve read some great books, here are my top two recommendations:

1) Birthing from Within by Pam England and Robert Horowitz

2) Great with Child by Beth Ann Fennely

And before I go, here is one of my many favourite quotes from Great with Child:

On becoming a mother:

“You understand yourself as lodged in history in a way you didn’t before. Your beliefs will be tested, your hypotheses put into action, so you’ll consider them in a new way.  Whether you’re explaining where pets go when they die or teaching your child to recycle, your philosophies have ramifications. For the rest of history, echoes of your voice will be heard”.