Combing my Ground

With the length of TTC behind me, my one dream in this journey became the wish to know what a BFP looked like. What it felt like to be sitting in a waiting room, not waiting to join the range of pregnant bellies but rather walking with one.

When I did become pregnant, and felt all that I wanted to know the joy of pregnancy, and I was joyed everyday about the fact that there would be a baby at the end of this.

I enjoyed my growing belly rather than feel the need to cover the bulge. I loved it. When I went for my C-section last year, my senses were focused on hearing the baby's first cry, finding out the gender and all that.

Then the ground shook, and I lost the dream. I went back to the zero from where I had started. It was not even a zero. It was somewhere below. My fingers were still tingling from the fact that I had cracked my dream at the very hair-width of fruition.

Then I started trying again.

I became pregnant. My focus went from trying to get pregnant, to staying pregnant. With this pregnancy, I had a comparable experience for every milestone I had reached in CBub's pregnancy. My focus remained on the now.

And there was fear. I hoped the thing that happened last time would not repeat. It couldn't repeat, could it? So many women I know in the ALI blogosphere have suffered neonatal loss and then have been able to give birth to children and/or are parenting. But I knew that exceptions were there. And there were no guarantees. And someone in my professional contacts let me know their own neonatal loss heartache - two strikes in a row....can you imagine?

My vision remained cued to the desire of Figlia staying alive.

So even though there was experience of TTC, and pregnancy milestones, I had no idea or comparable experiences for raising a newborn.

I want to admit that it was only when I was walking out of the hospital with Figlia in my arms, that it actually dawned on me that I had gone through a pregnancy, birthed a baby, and the baby was alive, and now mine to raise. Last time, this sentence had been cruelly stunted and punctuated at birthed a baby.

My focus had been so much on getting and staying pregnant that, this life with baby did come as a shock to me.

I still get overwhelmed at times. Not at big things, but when I can't hold my need to relieve myself and the baby can't seem to let go of my bre@sts, I start to lose it. I never compromised on sleeping, and when I did, it was only for pleasure or some fun activity, and I was always able to compensate it.

Now, I am sleep deprived and learning to cope with small bits of scattered sleep, and the ability to feel recharged in them.

And then, there is a delightful conversation (truly delightful and surprising; fodder for my next post) that happened between DH and me, and I surprised myself with my own reaction.

And I feel a release, not as a consequence of the stated conversation, but overall - a psychological sigh of relief.

I am glad Figlia is here. She changes so many things. She changes the rut I had got myself into over the last few years. She changes my compulsive need to be clammed up every end-cycle. She changes my need to be wishful and nothing else.

With Figlia, every day is a new territory. I have nothing to fall back on and chip in from first-hand memory.

She is real. This is happening to me. She is teaching me to be a mum.

Only once I get over this sleep and such things, I can't wait for her to start sitting, and crawling, and walking, and calling me mum, her first days of school, what activities she would love to do....I am so curious to find out. Just the fact that she seems to recognize my voice makes me fuzzy.

What kind of an individual she is? How she has picked up her genes from both of us, and what she makes them into?

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