emotional

Today is my daughter's first birthday. It has been a strange day - for me not her - I have found it deeply emotional and I think it is to do with the trauma surrounding her birth. This picture is my favourite picture of any picture ever taken ever... It was taken by my husband just after she was born and just after I had regained consciousness and it looks so peaceful you would never know the extreme emotions we had gone through less than an hour earlier. When I was part way through the last stage of labour the midwife found that every time I had a contraction my little baby bird's heartbeat was going dangerously low - to the point it almost stopped and didn't return to normal. On examination they found that she had the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck and was being strangled every time I had a contraction. The scene became something from an ER drama with doctors and nurses appearing from nowhere to pin me down, shave my pubic hair and knock me out completely - all just at the moment I find out my (deeply connected to me) child is in grave danger of dying. I have never been truly terrified before and never want to shake so uncontrollably again at my feeling of helplessness and desperate despair. And then I was gone - at the most important moment of my life so far - I was unconscious. I can't tell you how sad that makes me. And the horrible feeling of hearing her cry as I drifted back to life but not even being able to open my eyes to see her I was so deeply sedated even though my whole body was straining to go to her....Fortunately she was perfect and her birth did her no physical damage - although I wonder if the trauma will have some deep-routed emotional effect (hence the breastfeeding for as long as she feels she needs it). I have suffered emotionally - not so much about missing her birth any more ( to have her alive and perfect is easy to rationalise about when the alternative was to have had a stillborn baby) but about surgery...about someone of sound mind being able to cut into my flesh and see my internal organs. About someone making that first incision into my soft pregnant belly with a cold sharp metal knife when I am helpless and vulnerable. It feels like an absolute violation - a deep act of violence against me and although I know it was not and although I know it was the only thing to happen I still cannot look at the scar or even touch it, and the thought of it makes me feel sick. I know I have issues (jessica you know more than most) and one day perhaps I will be able to face them but that is why at 20.02 (her birth time) tonight as I write this I find myself crying and unable to objectify my thoughts at all....


This is my other favourite picture of all time. My poor husband went through hell as he was made to sit in a dark room outside the operating theatre yet he was a rock and a star and is our knight in shining armour....