"Baby"

I asked folks to “Toss Me: A Birth-Related Word” on my Navelgazing Midwife Facebook Page and “Baby” was the first word. Here, I’ll use the words as springboards from which to jump.

Baby:

Today I had a baby. 28 years ago today, I had my baby Meghann. At home. An unassisted birth. If I stayed in that moment, it was amazing, empowering, glorious and triumphant. I hadn’t yet looked back to the carelessness of my actions, how I’d come so close to losing my newborn girl. Then, I was high as a new mom could be with joy and love. She was huge! I’d pushed for two hours and had this ten-pound-plus child out my vagina, knowing she would have been a cesarean if I’d have been in the hospital. I’d done it! I had the homebirth I ached to have.

I held my new baby to my breast, feeling how fat she was, next to my own fatness and you could hardly tell where one of us ended and the other began. She smelled so good. So raw. We didn’t bathe her for days and days. We smooshed her vernix into her skin, finding stores of it in her (copious) creases.

Even almost three decades later, I can feel her in my arms. I know now that memory will never leave me… and I am so thankful for that. That I can feel the weight of her body in my arms, feel the way her hand wrapped around my forefinger and see her eyes as she looked into mine.

Baby. My baby. I had a baby. Baby, Mine. I love my baby. I loved kissing my baby. I love you, my baby girl.

Other words I’ll jump off of:

• Cesarean
• Primal
• Placenta
• Mucous
• High
• Open
• Trust
• Fecund

And surely many more.

Comments

[Leaves of My Tree]

You've managed to turn a simple word into poetry. Beautiful.