I was sitting in a stuffy little white room, on a blue plasticky bed, my feet not touching the floor. I felt like a small child, like I should be swinging my legs and singing rather than sitting as still as I was, just waiting. It felt like an eternity before the doctor came back, clipboard in hand and white coat tails flying behind her. She flipped a few pages and asked me how I was feeling. My hand flew instinctively to my swollen belly, that tell tale reminder of the fact that I wasn’t a child with no cares in the world. I was an adult with scary decisions to make and the weight of worries resting on my shoulders forevermore.
I didn’t know how I was feeling. These appointments were blending into one now, the same four walls for hours at a time, the same rhythmic beeps and clicks and the same pounding fears stretching out between now and whenever they would finally decide enough is enough. (more…)
natural for me to need the prop during times of crisis. 
My second baby was born amidst beeps and wires. A stranger’s hands plucked him from my body and thrust him into the world. A stranger’s hands held him close, and willed him to take a breath. A stranger’s hands were his first experience of human contact, in a cold and sterile operating theatre. His little blue body was taken away to have tubes inserted and his chest massaged. And he did it. He breathed. He turned pink. He screamed!
He was born at 6.45 on a frosty December evening, just six minutes after the surgeon put his knife to my skin. He was taken away, forced to breathe and urged to scream. He was cleaned, he was dressed, he was wrapped in a blanket. When I woke up, he was in his father’s arms and a complete stranger to me. This was surely NOT the baby I had carried for 41 weeks and 2 days. This was NOT the baby I had felt kick and roll and turn through all those weeks. This was NOT what I had imagined at all. And yet it was my reality.