Under the Surface

Last night on our run Burke got a stitch in his side, so we slowed to a walk and began to talk.  At one point he brought up his co-worker whose wife just had a baby this past week (which I already knew), but then proceeded to tell me that she delivered said baby in thirty minutes (which I did not know).  "Thirty minutes, are you kidding me?!"

And out of no where, I'm crying.  

I'm picturing that delivery room from almost nine months ago and the excitement and fear and pain that all swirl together in a whirlpool of emotion while I wait for my little one to arrive.  I'm so certain that it's going to be as I always imagined it; on that final push feeling a surge of release as my child tumbles from womb to world, breathing the same air I'm breathing, feeling my skin on her skin, looking into my eyes which mirror her eyes, comprehending in that look that she is loved and she is mine.  I'm curious to see the umbilical cord cut and what a baby really looks like when they come out all covered in goop, but most of all I'm dying to see my baby in her Papa's arms for the first time, to see him count her fingers and toes and stroke her head and kiss her face.

But it doesn't happen like that.

I labor for an eternity.  I push for hours.  I try with all my might to bare down the way the nurses are instructing me to.  I fail to do what billions upon billions of women have done for thousands of years.

I don't get to see my child emerge, or hear her cry out, or press her to my skin and drink in her initial sent.  I don't get to hold my angel unassisted.  I see her for one minute and then she is gone, whisked away for hours and hours until I wheel into the NICU and shudder at the site of alien tubes and needles.  I want them out.  I want my baby and I want to go home.  But it doesn't happen like that either.

I try to tell Burke this as we walk down the street, pushing a jogging stroller with our real-life little one asleep in a fuzzy blanket cocoon.  I try to explain how I felt: weak, afraid, defective.  I try to explain how awful it feels to know that I will never be able to deliver a baby normally.  I try to describe how if feels to have my agency partially stripped from me, knowing the danger of too many c-sections will make it impossible for us to have a large family.

And instead of agreeing or listening silently, he gets angry.  He tells me in no uncertain terms that I am not a failure.  He tells me to think of our friends who have not had the opportunity to have children and how they would not care if their baby was born "natural" or c-section as long as they could have them at all.  He reminds me of the relief he felt when they wheeled me into that operating room, knowing that if we didn't live in this era of miraculous modern medicine that I would be gone and possibly our daughter too.

I know he's right and I feel ashamed for my disappointments and my tears, but the emotion is still real.  Under the surface I've been carrying this guilt.  Like maybe if I had tried to exercise more during the pregnancy and been stronger, maybe I could have done it.  Maybe this.  Maybe that.

But what it whittles down to in the end, is that I have a child.  And she is miraculous.  And she has changed my life in such a radically positive way that I will never be the same again.  For that, and for her, I am eternally grateful.

I don't know if I just needed to admit my sense of failure, to have it confessed and confided, but I can feel the ripples smoothing.  I can feel the guilt receding that I didn't even know resided in my heart, replaced with a more complete sense of gratitude and love.  Sometimes it shocks me what is hiding under this surface and how long these emotions can conceal themselves even from your own mind until the right phrase ("Thirty minutes?!") can bring them skittering from their nooks and crannies to pierce your heart and make you confront them head on.

How grateful I am to a husband who can hold my hand through it all.