Stretched

As my son’s head descended inside my pelvis I had the distinct and overwhelming feeling that it wasn’t going to fit. It was too big, it wasn’t going to work, and I’d quite like to go home, finish watching Buffy, and forget this silly baby business thank you very much.

Baby foot“It’s too big!” I gasped at my midwives, eyes frantic.

“You can do it!” they replied.

This, I believe, is called transition. In labour there is usually a point not long before the baby is born when a mother feels that birth is an insurmountable challenge. It’s usually when the baby’s head is stretching a once cosy and private space into oblivion. It is a sense of fullness that I felt in my very bones. I knew things were at capacity. My pelvis was going to crack under the pressure. I was going to tear in two.

The midwives were right – I could do it. The funny thing about labour is that you don’t really have a choice. Once I hit 7cm my body was taken over by earth-shuddering surges that were far beyond my control. Every contraction peaked then my body shook with a convulsive effort to get the baby out. It wasn’t me doing it. It was happening whether I liked it or not. And in the early hours of that Tuesday morning, he arrived, tearing muscle and skin like paper and rending a permanent welt on my heart. It took everything I had and then some.

Because one of the main things I have learned as a new parent is that becoming one stretches you to your limits, then pushes you a little bit more. Immediately after my son was born, as we lay snuggled up and still wet from the birthing pool, I felt invincible – except for the fact that everything that mattered to me in the world was now wrapped up in the tiny, helpless form of this tiny human, snoring in my cleavage.

In the days immediately after birth, I kept a diary. I charted the vulnerability I felt as I rode the emotional tidal wave of being immediately postpartum, described the huge pressure of feeding your child when you’re still trying to figure out how your enormous new boobs work, and named the threats that hovered in my peripheral vision 24 hours a day. These ranged from strangers who came within 15 feet of the pram to our two curious cats and their desperate efforts to sleep in anything that smelled of him.

And at the root of all my fears was overwhelming love. The kind of love that tenderises you like a steak and leaves you bruised and raw and open, as if someone could simply walk up to you and pluck out your beating heart. It’s as if the volume had been turned up on every emotion. Colours were brighter and more beautiful and yet the world had never been a more terrifying place.

I have been a parent for about five weeks now and every day I feel the stretch. When my son cries in the evenings and I don’t understand why. When he’s fighting against me when I try to feed him, despite every sign telling me that he’s hungry. When he’s inconsolable and I’m crying on the sofa too because I can’t seem to fix whatever has gone wrong. When he wakes in the night for another feed and I have to shake off the heaviness of much needed sleep. Every time I feel the stretch and sometimes I think I can’t do it. Every time, I can. And I have seen what’s ahead – I know the challenges and joys will persist and evolve for the rest of our lives. The well of patience is not limitless but fortunately the well of love might just be.

Becoming a parent, they tell you, is the biggest commitment you can make. But the highs – from snuggling up with your newborn, to seeing their first smiles, to their tiny full body yawns and hiccups – are more than enough to overwhelm the fear or the frustrations. The love stretches you and makes you softer.

Some nights it might feel like it’s never going to fit. It might feel like it can’t possibly work. You might feel so unbelievably exhausted that you start to wish David Bowie would appear in wig and codpiece, ‘do a Labyrinth’, and take the baby away for just a few minutes. But you can do it, because you’re only ever seeing the tip of the iceberg of who you are and how strong you can be. Remember, you’re in transition.

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