Well hello!

Bloody hell. D'y'know, I'd actually genuinely forgotten I had this blog. And then I remembered.

I've just been re-reading my posts. Non-sequiteur city, for the most part, which is really annoying and I'll fill one of the gaps now. I noticed that I go from two months into a new relationship with an old friend to suddenly being a mother. Well, that's pretty much how it happened, only it took longer. We got together, about a year later we started trying for a baby, she was born in 2007. She's still with us today!

On that subject, here's a thing I've been musing on:

What did you expect when you were expecting?

Recently, I’ve been reminded of what it’s like to live with a small baby. I already have a child, her name’s Jess and she’s five and she’s marvellous, but my memories of her earliest months have been sort of mashed in my brain into a weird sleepless-zombie montage of smiling, crying, hiccoughing, sleeping and puking (that’s her) or smiling, staring, cooing, wiping and worrying (from me). We have many, many photos of this period, but I have very few really clear memories. It’s amazing what cumulative sleep deprivation can do.

Now Jess is well past the baby stage; she’s started ‘big school’ and I’ve made a couple of friends among the other parents, one of whom is a single-mum with a son in Jess’ class and a four-month-old daughter. Spending the odd couple of hours a week with them has reminded me how it really was during those first few months of motherhood. For example, I’d forgotten how intensely satisfying it is to make a baby laugh (seriously, it’s the best pick-me-up), but also how relentlessly knackering it is to look after a small, wailing thing all day and night. It has also reinforced my determination not to have any more of my own. Sorry, Jess, you’re an only child. Get used to it.

But, strangely, what’s really come screaming back to me is the memory of the night she was born and some of the weird, unexpected feelings that came out of that. The birth itself was relatively straightforward; the odd minor emergency, some mild panic, nothing major. (No pain-relief either, and I don’t say that proudly, I say it angrily. I wanted pethidine, I wanted an epidural, I would’ve accepted vodka on a drip, but what I got was a couple of double-strength paracetamol five hours before the birth. Grrrrr. But anyway…). But as soon as she was handed to me, I was surprised that I wasn’t more surprised.

Let me explain.

TV has told me that, when a baby is born, the mother will sit up in bed with her newly-swaddled progeny in her arms and look upon its face with unadulterated wonder. She’ll gaze at the human she’s carried for the last few months as if it’s an astonishing miracle. I’ve seen this image so many times on telly that it didn’t even occur to me that it might not actually happen. Now, in hindsight, I wonder why it happens at all.

When Jess was born, when the birth was over, the overriding feeling I had was relief. Relief that she was whole and healthy, relief that the labour had been relatively uncomplicated, and huge, massive relief that it was all over and the pain had stopped (well, mostly stopped. There was no sitting up for me, my hips and coccyx were aching like mad. Anyone else have that?). But what I DIDN’T feel was awe. I looked at my beautiful baby and loved her, but I didn’t feel that sense of amazement that I’d been led to believe would wash over me in a tidal wave of maternal something-or-other. I was weirdly disappointed – not with Jess, I want to make that perfectly clear, she was (and is) gorgeous – with myself. Wasn’t I supposed to be overcome? Why was this?

Well, I’ve given it some thought and come to the conclusion that a beautiful baby is, really, what I was expecting to get. All the scans and check-ups had been fine, and everything I’d seen, heard or read about pregnancy led me to believe that, at the end of it, I’d have a baby. I mean, that’s pretty much what I’d been aiming for in the first place.

So why on earth do (apparently) so many mothers look so surprised at the first sight of their child? What were they expecting?

“Darling, look! For a while during the labour I thought we might have been blessed with the entire collected works of Neil Diamond, but LOOK! It’s a baby instead!”

In a pinch, if I wasn’t to get a baby at the end of it, I’d’ve settled for a puppy. THEN there would have been cause for genuine shock. Imagine the look on the midwife’s face.

“Holy crap, it’s a Labrador!”
“Hmm, I guess we’ll have to redecorate the nursery then. Those toy kittens will have to go…”

There are many reasons to be amazed in life, but being astounded at the sight of something you knew was coming, that you’ve been looking forward to for several months, that you might already have given a name to, well with the benefit of hindsight, that actually seems a bit weird to me now. I wonder if I’m the only one…