First week flashbacks

Yesterday my menstrual cycle returned for the first time in 18 months. It caught me by surprise, great clots of blood in the late evening, and the only thing in my drawer was the remainder of the packet of enormous chunky pads I had been using immediately after giving birth. I lay in bed and memories of that first week of Talia’s life floated to the surface, almost as if they had been hiding in the packet.

It was so surreal, it felt like a dream even the first time around. The wheelchair and the catheter, and the syringe you squeeze to inject yourself with more pethidine. The bruising and the bleeding. Not wanting any visitors, not wanting to see the alien full term moon-babies in the ward. The nurses waking me in the middle of the night for more pills and another blood pressure check. Clearest of all, the nursery with the rows of humidicribs, the glow of the fluorescent lights over the babies with jaundice, the incessant beeping and the bewildering array of monitors with their different coloured lines and the numbers constantly changing.

It was most eerie but most beautiful in the middle of the night, when I came down, sleep-deprived, to express at 3am. It was a world away from the same journey during the day. Walking through the quiet, seemingly empty hospital in my pyjamas. No visitors huddled in the corridor, no anxious grandparents and bewildered siblings, no tearful mothers being wheeled in to see their baby for the first time, clutching their parner in one hand and their camera in the other, nobody chattering about the mundanities of life, only the hushed tones of the night staff almost inaudible above the sound of the pump and the monitor alarms. The windows dark and the overhead lighting subdued although all the machines and the desk lights still glowed, like a scene from a spaceship. Through the porthole window, a tiny, translucent dream-child who should be curled up in the dark sea of my womb, not in this nest of wires and tubes. Her eyes were tightly shut, but her fingers gripped mine with an intensity which gave me so much confidence for her survival.

It felt like a dream, but no dream could be more amazing.