The first week with you has been a blur of sleepless nights, raging hormones, and unexplainable tears.  I am stressed and tired and so utterly, inexplicably in love.  And anxious.  I'm anxious for no reason.  Anxious if you're getting enough food, if you're too hot or cold, if I've swaddled you tightly enough to keep you from moving during the night.  I'm anxious that my relationship with Tim will never be the same, that somehow your arrival will result in our marriage becoming a divorce statistic. I'm terrified of the vulnerability which accompanied your grand entrance to this world.  I will never be the same because now I can't think about myself without also thinking about you.  You have made me so, so very raw.  So exposed. I felt this way as soon as I got out of my first trimester, too.  Things weren't just about me anymore and it kept me up at night.  The world is less scary when the only thing you risk losing is yourself.  When you are so desperately in love with someone that their absence would utterly tear you apart the world is a bit more daunting.

I recognize, of course, that these are fear versus love choices I am making and that I am mostly choosing fear.  I blame the lack of sleep and the PTSD from your labor for that.

I labored for 30 hours to bring you into this world and it nearly ended in a c-section.  I started to feel something (God I prayed it was labor...almost 42 weeks of pregnancy is enough for any human) at 8pm on a Tuesday.  Tim and I went out for pizza at a wee little local place that just opened and I eyed his beer enviously.  He ordered the Perennial Aria and it cost $25 but he did it just because we were pretty sure that would be your name and we were certain you would be here by Friday since the doctors wouldn't let you stay in any longer.  I was so big at that point that I had to pull the table out from the booth to fit.  I was a first place waddler, too.  I believe at my walk at Chatfield that morning I was walking 24 minute miles.  24 minute miles. Pregnancy is a beautiful thing.

I stayed up late that night to see if the contractions would go away.  They didn't.  And so I went to sleep and did so pretty restfully until 1am when I couldn't sleep through them anymore.  We waited until morning (4:30 to be precise) and went to L and D where they discovered I was no more dilated than I had been at my appointment the previous day. They told me I could go and walk or head home. As I found it nearly impossible to walk through the contractions, we drove the 40 minutes home where I promptly went to bed to writhe around in an insane amount of pain every four minutes.

One of the things I find most remarkable about this experience is the fact that although I clearly recall thinking cognitively in the day after those sharp contractions that they were the absolute worst pain I have ever felt, I can no longer viscerally understand what that means.  In the same way that I imagined labor before ever having experienced it in this very hypothetical and detached way, my understanding of the feeling of it has returned to something of an imaginary stage.  It must be a miracle of nature and hormones and the incredible drive of the biological need to propagate oneself that we forget.  Because I remember the wrenching being absolutely unbearable.  And as 9:30am approached, each contraction held me and shook me and destroyed me (hypothetically, of course, since I can only remember recalling that they were awful, awful, awful).

When we arrived at the hospital at that point, I had dilated to a four and was admitted.  I was pretty convinced we were going to do a water birth.  But I was a big fat liar.  As soon as I arrived in my room, I asked for an epidural and they called the anesthesiologist immediately.  His name was Chuck. He was my favorite person in the entire hospital.  He'll probably be my favorite person for the rest of my life.

Regardless, as soon as we arrived in the room, my water broke.  I stood up to withstand the pain of the contraction and felt a wee drizzle and then more of a drizzle and it took me a bit to figure out what was happening.  And the crazy, gross thing that no one ever talks about is the fact that with each contraction, more and more amniotic fluid gushes out of your uterus.  Gushes.  With every push and pull of that amazing muscle, more fluid than you thought possible puddles around you.

Chuck arrived pretty quickly and from here on the story gets a little repetitive because with the pain dulled, the only thing left to do was wait for my body to be ready.  But my body did not get ready on its own because after laboring for about 19 hours I developed a fever and a headache and they ultimately decided I had an infection and would need IV antibiotics.  Shortly thereafter, your heart rate kept dropping and I had to roll around the bed with numb legs quite beached-whale like.  They played an audio of your heart rate throughout the entire labor.  After it was over and I was in a different, quieter room, I could still hear your heart racing in my ears.  After 17 hours of listening to your vitality, I fell asleep (very briefly as you were STARVING) with it still murmuring in my ears. Listening to it slow down was absolutely terrifying and I would roll and roll and move and rotate in order to get it back to normal and thank God every time I heard it rumble from 40 beats per minute to your usual 140.

Ultimately they decided each contraction was compressing your cord and pumped IV fluid back into my uterus (which, for the record, caused more pleasant gushing with each contraction).  After your heart slowed often enough, the midwife (Jessica) came to let me know I would be consented for a c-section.  If you were not out in two more hours or if your heart continued to have trouble, I was headed to surgery.

And this is the point in my labor that a very, very funny thing happened.  And I suppose it occurs often when folks are in a crisis.  I spoke to you and let you know you had better hurry things along if you wanted to make your own way into this world.  And then I spoke to my grandparents who have passed and my relatives and whatever higher power may or may not exist and I asked for help.  I asked for comfort because I was scared and I asked for a miracle because I did not want to go to surgery but I did want you to be healthy. And so I find myself, the eternal skeptic, ever hypocritical in asking for and finding comfort in the idea that those who have come before us have a role in shaping the destiny of those currently occupying this wee planet.  Because you, Aria, are as much a part of them as you are of me.  We are all a long, tremendous continuation of those who have come before and it was comforting to know that my mom and grandma and great grandma had all done it before. And, I imagine, they likely did so without the tremendous aid offered by my dear buddy Chuck.

Regardless, the two hours passed and with the help of my new favorite drug Pitocin, I felt a tremendous need to take a giant poop on the table. When Jessica checked my cervix, I had indeed dilated to a 10 and we were ready to get you out.

All the modesty I had been so preoccupied with during my pregnancy was immediately out the window.  I told Tim early on in the pregnancy that he could stand no where but at the head of the bed by my shoulders but, to be honest, I just did not give a damn.  I figured he had already seen me catheterized with water gushing down my legs rhythmically so the destruction of my vagina was likely no big thing.  I did not think that at the time, of course, because mostly I was just utterly exhausted and scared and praying you made your way safely to us.  I was 28 hours in and into my second night without sleep and the only thing I could focus on was the hours and days and months I spent in the pool and the incredible discipline it took to get there at five and the pain at the end of the last set of a 10,000 yard workout and the strength of will it took not to give up and simply stop and throw in the towel.  And so I focused on how much the butterfly kick sucks and how terribly the 200 backstroke hurts and how much the circuit my coach Ben created my senior year made me want to puke and I thought of all that time and how I hadn't given up and I pushed and pushed and pushed. During the process of your descent into my pelvis, your heart seemed to stabilize and shortly Tim was ooing and awing over the sight of your head.

I know for a fact that I pooped on the table approximately ten times.  The nurse (bless all their hearts) graciously cleaned it up and no one mentioned how absolutely disgusting it is to hang out in a room smelling someone else's shit.  Working in the medical field, I can attest that it's the worst smell in the world.  And at some point, I'm pretty sure, the numbness of the epidural led me to actually pee a little bit on the table.  And in the ultimate finale of having absolutely no shame, you crowned at a glorious 8 pounds and 1 ounce and made your way into the world through an exit which seems inappropriately small.

But when you arrived, no one cared at all about the exit.  Not at all.  Because all eyes were on you.

Your epic birth story continues here, however, because when you came out you weren't breathing. They suspected you may not be based on the tube with which they inserted the saline because they thought there may be meconium occasionally coming out of my uterus.  As such, they had preemptively called in the pediatrics team who were standing in the corner of the room (approximately six very professional and serious looking folks who would show up at 2am just to be certain that you would be alright...bless their hearts, too).

The epidural is a grand thing, but not grand enough to completely numb the sensation of a baby coming into the world.  When your head had finished coming out, the pressure was absolutely very real and very awful and very reminiscent of the contractions without an epidural.  But it didn't matter at all because I was just so thankful that you had come.

Although it's all very hazy to me, Tim tells me that every person in the room had a clearly defined role and performed it extraordinarily.  The minute you were out the umbilical cord was clamped and cut and you were handed to a member on the pediatrics team.  Tim rushed over to where they worked on suctioning and getting all of the meconium out of your system and my midwife worked on putting me back together.  They wheeled you away to the neonatal nursery which, I understand, is simply a matter of protocol as within a half an hour they had you back up in our room.

Regardless, in addition to the complication of the meconium, your cord was wrapped around your neck and my placenta had a couple of crazy anomalies and the infection was later confirmed to be chorioamnionitis likely caused by my water breaking and the subsequent exposure of my uterus to poop.  The stalled labor, they suspect, had everything to do with the infection weakening my system and your safe delivery into this world has everything to do with all the right people working on us that night.  Had we been somewhere else, somewhere smaller (or God forbid, at home) one or both of us wouldn't have made it.

I did not realize any of this initially, of course. At the time, I was simply focused on the task at hand. But when I take a step back and realize all the ways things could have gone so, so terribly wrong, I realize how lucky we were.

In the days following the delivery, I do think I have suffered a bit of shock over the whole thing, a bit of trauma.

Whether it was my relatives to whom I shot some desperate prayers or the powers that be or simply a tremendous moment of grace in both our lives, I am extraordinarily thankful to be holding you in my arms tonight.

To be continued when I have slept.  Just a little.  Because I know you will be up again soon and the sleep deprivation shall continue.