So it happened. Our family of two became a family of three. It’s probably one of the most exciting nerve-wracking and anxiety-provoking a set of days I’ve ever had. I wouldn’t take it back for anything. I sit here now day two of having her home at 5:30 a.m. pulling the late night shift letting Mama get some sleep, and it just feels so right.
I’m going to need so much time just to process everything that happened since Tuesday. I would love the document my thoughts and experience from my point of view and I need to do that pretty soon before the details start to get fuzzy. But at this point I think I’m in the compartmentalizing phase. My focus is purely on being the most helpful I can be towards this little girl and her incredible mother.
So instead of going into details I think I just wanted to take some time to note some observations about being a parent at this point. First of all, instinct. I think once you get to a certain age and life becomes a certain level of normal and your day-to-day fails to change in any great way, you stop realizing just how much of your life is instinctual. From the absolute moment that she was born, it felt like my brain unlocked a certain set of knowledge of what to do that I certainly didn’t necessarily know or learn. Sometimes that feeling can be a little scary to think that my brain is just freewriting. It’s making it up as we go along. But more than that it’s really exciting and fascinating to see myself as well as Paint do certain things to care for this baby that I know neither of us necessarily knew before now. I’m well aware we’re going to get things wrong. It’s not always going to be perfect. It’s not always going to be right. But I feel oddly confident and equipped, I wonder if some of that is possibly because the pregnancy although it had its challenges. We never came to a point in which we felt like we lost control. In labor there was points at which it felt like we did. When it comes to giving birth in your typical setting for us, it was a matter of trusting the people that deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis. I understand the appeal of quote un quote natural births a little bit more now but I still think it’s something that I would never feel comfortable with. At some point we just had to shut down and let the other people take over and I think that gave me a certain level of comfort in knowing I had the ability to do that knowing I had the ability to let somebody else take over when things were outside of the scope of what we were capable of. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I think my opinion of that now. The reason that people say that isn’t that you need a big arsenal of people. It’s that you need to trust and believe in the guidance of others, and know how to combine that into your own internal guidance as well as learned experiences. Oh also, having RLS is pretty convenient when you’re trying to sooth a baby to sleep.
I wrote this using speech to text. It’s going to be hot mess. I don’t care.
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