On Lampreys and Dragons

Dear Amy,

So, it’s official: You have a baby!  That’s so weird!  Like one day there was the idea of a baby and the shape of a baby but now there’s this squooshy little proto-human with flailing limbs and squinty eyes and this strange purple “O” for a mouth.  Were you surprised there was an actual person in there after all, and not, say, some sort of alien lamprey?

Love,
Annie

Dear Annie,

It was indeed a surprise. I’m not sure if I had mentioned this to you, but I was fairly certain I was growing a dragon. There were just some shapes she was making in there that felt as though they could not possibly be human.

Anyway, it turns out the baby comes out of your VAGINA. Sometimes, after hours and hours of contractions that get increasingly more difficult to work through. I had read all the hippy propaganda. I was ready for some sort of transcendent experience. Instead, it was pain upon pain for a long time on almost no sleep. But do you know what? After all the labor, I PUSHED THAT BABY OUT IN THIRTY MINUTES. Most first-babies require two to three hours of pushing. I screamed like a banshee the whole time. 

To be honest, Annie, after forty hours of labor, I was relieved to have ANYTHING come out of there. The fact that it was a perfect little girl was the icing on the cake, but somehow made it seem even more impossible that she was ours. I can’t tell you how many times during our hospital stay that Jason or I lamented aloud about how sad we were to have to give the baby back when we left. There just seemed no conceivable way that they were going to let us take this delightful little creature home with us.

I should go get back to it. “It” being laying around in my pajamas and snuggling with the baby and my husband. It’s a tough life over here these days, by which I mean to say it’s the best and most wonderful thing EVER. So far, the best part of being a mom is that I have this innate ability to make this tiny thing happy and calm. It’s not even, like, “I’m such a good mom,” it’s just that, as her mom, I’m the thing in the world she’s the most comfortable with. It’s…pretty cool.

Love,
Amy