The eyes say it all

How can one week change my life so completely? The second photo is the picture I wanted to show the world, to go with the blog I wrote in my hospital room 5 days ago when life was as perfect as it could be. Below is that blog. Then below that, is what happened when my world ended at 3am on Saturday morning, and so the first picture is the one I NEED the world to see.

For so long you have lain on my lungs and my spine, my stomach shoved under my left armpit, my bladder squashed somewhere behind my right buttock. But three days ago, they lifted you out and laid you in my arms, your head laid on my heart. For something so small, babies have an incredible capacity to fill every atom of the world around them - you are not yet three days old, yet I hardly remember life before you. You have filled every breath. My lungs are back in place, but the air in them is bursting with the smell of you. We are cocooned in our little world, the occassional visitor entering our womb of wonder but leaving us again. Your gorgeous ginger dad is delighted - his first excited words: "she's a red-head!" I'm not at all convinced but I'm not going to burst his ginger bubble yet. Daisy and Poppy, your sisters are smitten, and you are already accepting of being pulled and prodded.

I am hostage to your lips, smacking and slapping as they clasp my burgeoning breasts, sucking and searching constantly, one deep blue eye occassionally peeking at me, winking, watchful, wonderful. I'm a bit dazed, my c-section wound curtailing my energy bubble, which is supressed by your feeding needs. So dazed and bewitched am I, the Dr thinks I've been at the drugs cabinet. As he came in to see me we gazed at your perfection. My delireous smile faltered, I gasped, aghast. There was a cut on your head! How had it happened? How could I have been so careless? I was mortified, embarrassed, guilt-ridden. We quickly examined you, concern turning to confusion on his face, confusion turning to comprehension on my face.

"Ah," I said, taking a lick. "That'll be a dollop of my mum's homemade blackberry jelly." My guilty mid-night feast had been discovered.

I am getting to know you, so strange, yet so right. You are mine, and always have been. We were always meant to be and it feels like the final piece of the jigsaw has fitted into place, and now the picture is complete. I made you, but you completed me. Welcome my love, our Ruby Rose - a little gem in our garden of flowergirls.

4 days later- I am in the darkest days of my life. My worst nightmare woke me from my sleep at 3am on Saturday night, 4 days after my daughter was born, when my husband came into my hospital room and told me my lovely mum had had a massive stroke. My beautiful, vibrant mum, the woman who has shared time with me every day of my life, in person or on the phone, held me, comforted me, is lying in a bed looking 150, unable to speak, locked in a silent hell. Her eyes occassionally open and they see me. Sometimes they scream for me to help her. Sometimes they love me so intensly I feel the earth shudder with the force. In one week, I have had a new daughter whose eyes are dark pools of wonder that I have yet to discover, and my mum lies stricken, her eyes deep pools of fear and love - and a lifetime together of knowledge. My devastation is beyond my ability to comprehend, I don't know if the ground will ever be steady again.

In a week my world has transformed forever and two of the people I love most in the world are only open to me with their eyes. Somehow, I have to find the strength to be there for them both - and my girls and family. I have to look into their eyes and bring my baby forward, and bring my mum back.

The extraordinary ordinary

Tomorrow, I'm having a baby. How strange to write that, to know that, but there it is. About lunchtime actually. Such an ordinary, everyday event. Yet such an extraordinary, primeval, earth-shattering, life-changing event too. Tomorrow I meet my daughter, a person I will love with ferocious intensity for the rest of my life.

As a child I always wanted to be different. I didn't want to fit in, instead I strived to stand out. I don't know why. I lived in my imagination, creating stories and imagined experiences, desperate for my perfectly fine, but ordinary, life to become extraordinary. That ambtion took me to Pakistan as a teenager to teach English, threw me into the scrum of women's rugby, led me to lead an orangutan through the jungles of Borneo and release it into the wild. With every book I devoured, with every word I ingested, my appetite for adventure increased.

I never wanted "the norm" and so I surprised myself along with everyone else when I married the man of my dreams, a wild-hearted adventurer and lover of life. And then it all became a bit serious - we had babies, we had losses, we had job-enforced separation, we had money issues, we had stresses. We had some laughs, we had lots of joy and even the odd little adventure. But I started to feel that old feeling of ordinaryness - a statistic even. Even my heartaches were numbers - one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. Older mums have a harder time keeping pregnancies. It frightened me.

But as I feel the last kicks of my baby before I hold her in my arms tomorrow, I know that my life is utterly extraordinary. The sheer amazingness of the girls, the joy of being loved by a great man, the thrill of being a mum. In doing the ordinary, I found the extraordinary.

Life is not made extraordinary by the things we do. Life is made extraordinary by the people we love. And tomorrow, I meet a new love of my life. Extraordinary, don't you think?

Fitting it all in.....

Despite only seven (yes!!!!!! only seven!!!!) weeks to go until I can lift this enormous boulder that is my stomach off my spine, and cradle a light little lump of loveliness in my arms instead.. this title does not actually refer to the fact that my lungs and stomach are now so squashed I can only breath standing up, and only eat one marshmallow size of food before my aesophagous fires up in anger and burns a hole in my chest while belching loudly in riotous outrage.

No - 'fitting it all in' now refers to my near frantic frenzy of to-do-lists I have to tick off before I get too fat to waddle and then too tired to bother.

I have emerged from my sloth-like caterpillar stage, through some imaginary hormone happy chrysalis, into some energetic, creatively juicy, albeit rather heavy and un-graceful butterfly, fluttering and muttering to myself as I prepare our household for the onslaught of a new baby. How could something so small, require so much preparation? Thinking, list-making, knitting, shopping, cooking, decorating, did I mention shoppng?, preparing bedrooms, making childcare plans.... never mind preparing our two girls for their little steps into the big worlds of school and montessori.

Between the sickness and tiredness of early and mid pregnancy I had to abandon many of my regular activities and focus on the essential.... like feeding my children. But now - resplendent in bulbous blooming bountiful energy - I have finished my novel. It is done. It is printed and I even posted it to an editor for some feedback. It may of course spend the next thirty years in my desk drawer, but it is done. But that's not all! I've made the curtains for the baby room, bought the beds for the girls, moved the cot into place, bought the buggy, and I've even made the To do list for Daisy's birthday party in October and bought her presents (yes I know, but it's only 3 weeks after the birth so I need to have it done!). I still have a list that hangs down to my feet (though thankfully I can see neither the end of the list or my feet). I have finished articles for Christmas deadlines, and bought 20 pie dishes for my culinary challenge of filling the freezer with nutritious food so nobody starves in the first few weeks. Daisy's school uniform is bought (though not labelled - add to list!), I've been reading Poppy books on starting Montessori, I have even - yes, may I stand proud and non-apologetic - bought some Christmas presents. And I've even returned to my blogging world and caught up with some old friends..... if you are still with me - I've missed reading your stories and am loving catching up with your hurly burly lives once more.
It feels good to be alive again, and now as I tick, tick, tick my lists, I count the days until the sleep sloth of sweet surrender mists over me again as the sweet smell of my new baby's head renders all my lists meaningless.
But for now, I am leading the charge on those lists like a demented dragon. No wonder then Daisy looked confused the other day when hubby told her she couldn't have something because he was the boss and said so. She looked at him, genuinely baffled, before replying, " But daddy, that's not true. Mummy is the boss."
I'm back!