I'm back from outer space.
Well, not completely back, but visiting, anyway. Getting to the computer to write a blog has not only been difficult, but not high on my priority list in this last week. My apologies. Hello good friends.
Please welcome Luke Atticus DeArmond to the world. Our little family is slowly getting used to being three instead of two, and I'm slowing getting used to being one person on the inside and two on the outside, instead of the other way around.
Labor was... an experience. Luke was born on October 14th. It took 5 hours altogether. I got up at 9:15 a.m., with the intent of throwing on my dance gear and taking a ballet class. I got two steps out of bed before my water broke. No dance class today. I took a shower and had some breakfast. Mid-way through my bowl of cereal, I had my first noticeable contraction. I had a couple at about 9 minutes apart, a couple at 6 minutes apart, and then they were three minutes apart and we were in the car for the hospital. We were at the hospital an hour later where I was pronounced to be 7 centimeters dilated. Four hours later, there was a baby on my tummy, curling his tiny fist around my little finger. It happened so fast, Shawn and I barely knew what hit us. The nurses at the hospital, who were still filling out the admission forms after Luke was born, said that if we're going to have a second child, we're going to have to move closer to the hospital.
I did it naturally. No pain killers and no chemical interventions, so to all those people out there who told me that I'd never make it through without drugs, thank you. You fueled my stubborn fire.
Women who have given birth told me that you kind of go to a different place in labor, that you go inside yourself. I'd also heard that you forget most the experience, presumably so your body can talk you into procreating again in the future. I don't think either of those things is entirely accurate. For me it was less of me going away, as it was everyone and everything else going away. I was the only one who was really there. I remember very little of what was said around me or what happened in the room. I remember my husband's face and his hands on my shoulders. I remember my best friend telling me that pushing was like holding that develope in ballet - it hurts, she said, but you have the muscles and you can do it. But mostly I was aware of myself, as if I were a place and a person, and truly, to Luke, that is what I had been.
I have been told that more than a few women thought it was unfair that my labor and delivery were so short, in comparison to the 24 hour labors they had with their first-borns. I suppose. I doubt very much that that makes it any easier. Like standing on a rock outcropping and contemplating the chilly water below, you can ease your body in slowly and painfully, or just jump in and take the shock. My body spent a week quietly behind the scenes, easing along, and then once I was in the water up to my waist, went "to heck with it" and dunked the rest in. That doesn't mean that the water was any warmer for me. It's just my way of dealing.
Do you forget it? No. But you come back to the world, or the world comes back to you, and there is no frame of reference for your experience here.
Standing at the finish line though... When that baby first lands on your stomach, when one person becomes two and two people become one all at the same time, when those worlds blend back together, that's an experience I have no words for. Dictionary.com says this of the word "delivery":
- a giving up or handing over; surrender.
- the act or manner of giving or sending forth.
- release or rescue; liberation; deliverance.
Sure. We'll go with that.
I'll write some more later this week, to tell you all about Luke and his little toes and little smiles. For now, I'm heading back out to outer space.