Dear Laura: A letter to myself
Dear Laura in December 2019,
I’m writing to you from the future. Your future. It’s December 2020 right now and the baby currently cooking in your increasingly large tummy is about to turn one (she starts walking at 9 months, by the way, so you might want to add baby-proofing gizmos to your list of things to buy early-on).
2020 hasn’t gone the way you expected it to go when you went on maternity leave on 15 December. I know that, right now, you’re worrying about how short your maternity leave is and are trying to engineer as much time at home with your baby as possible. Believe me when I tell you that you will get more time at home with your children in 2020 than you could ever have anticipated. I’ll leave it at that for now.
At 39 weeks pregnant I know you’re fed up. You’d expected this baby to have already put in an appearance by now. All the signs indicated that she would. But as you are slowly coming to realise, this baby is not the same as the first one. She has her own plan and yes, she will start her journey out of you the minute you surrender your control and relax. You’ll finally do this on Christmas Eve and you’ll have contractions as you watch your daughter put her mince pie and carrot out for Santa and Rudolph.
You have an idea in your head about how the birth is going to go. Lots of people have told you that the second one tends to come more quickly than the first, and Marianne made an efficient exit. So you’re expecting it to be done and dusted in less than 9 hours. I don’t want to scare or disappoint you, but it doesn’t go like that. This birth is very, very different to your first. There’ll be a lot of walking, talking, frustration, back rubbing, showering, squatting, and contractions that feel intense but remain irregular for the best part of 18 hours.
But do you know what? It ends how you want it to. You get the water birth you wanted (sort of). And yes, the water feels as good as you’re hoping it will. You’re loud this time, too. So loud, in fact, that your throat will be sore for 5 days afterwards. After a night of pacing around, you need to vent and scream that baby out. Don’t fight it. Go with it, when it happens.
You have a visceral memory of the moment Marianne was born. The feeling of fire immediately evaporating and the immense relief when the pain suddenly stopped. Hold on to that memory, because when you birth this daughter, the feeling will be even more intense. The pain is greater this time around and at times, you think you can’t take any more. But you can and you do. And when she’s born, that feeling of relief, of the pain suddenly going away like someone has flipped a switch, takes your breath away. (I won’t tell you what it’s like to hold your baby for the first time. I’ll let you discover that one for yourself.)
What I’m going to tell you now might cause you to worry. But remember: I’m writing to you from the future and I can put my hand on my heart and tell you that you are feeling positive and strong. So keep that in mind. Everything is going to be ok.
After giving birth, you spend a good 45 minutes in the pool enjoying the warmth and snuggles with the baby and your husband, but just like last time, your placenta refuses to budge. When you get out of the pool, you’ll feel tiredness hit you like a wall (still no placenta) and you’ll lay on the hospital bed whilst Phil does skin-to-skin with Sasha (yes, her name is Sasha, but you know that already because you named her the minute you knew you were pregnant, didn’t you?), waiting for the surgeon to arrive and prep you. Having this surgery again doesn’t worry you because you’ve done it before. You know you’ll be away for about an hour. No problem.
But, just as with everything else to do with this baby, this isn’t like last time. Whilst you’re laying on the bed listening to the lovely surgeon explain what’s going to happen, you’ll begin to feel dizzy and sick and you’ll struggle to breathe. You’ll notice your unflappable midwife glance beneath the sheet covering you and you’ll register (and remember) the look on her face.
You won’t be able to recall much about the next 4 hours, but the snippets you do remember (mostly of being rushed to the operating theatre) will be pretty accurate recollections, so trust those memories later, on ok? Long story short: your placenta ruptures. You bleed out. You become tachycardic. Your blood pressure drops to 30/20. And yes, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you almost die.
You’ll wake up some 4 hours later, hooked up to monitors, with 4 lines going into your arms carrying liquids of various colours. You’ll have weird expanding knee-high boots on, which presumably help to prevent clotting. It all seems so surreal. You’ll have lost a lot of blood (3 litres, in case you’re wondering) and it’s going to take a good 9-10 months for you to fully regain your strength, but don’t worry - it does come back. As you slowly wake up and Phil appears with Sasha, you realise that in the intervening hours, you’ve missed Marianne and Sasha meeting for the first time. This will upset you, but you’ll smile through the tears when you see your eldest daughter gently holding your youngest daughter for ‘your’ first time.
I’m not going to lie to you, Laura. It’s a traumatic time. For you, for Phil and for Marianne. You’ll spend half of 2020 dealing with panic attacks related to just how close you came to death. You’ll have therapy, you’ll realise you have PTSD, you’ll talk about it and learn techniques of coping with it and it will get better. It will become more manageable. You’ll learn not to dread the arrival of your daughter’s first birthday. It won’t herald sadness at what almost came to be. It will bring you joy. I promise.
The silver lining throughout all of this is your youngest daughter, who remains oblivious to your tumultuous feelings and concentrates instead of developing at a rate of knots. Seriously, Laura, this one doesn’t hang around. I don’t want to spoil the wonderful surprises that Sasha has in store for you, but I will say this: she is a pocket-rocket. A smiley, joyful, easygoing pocket-rocket who slots into your family unit like she’s always been there. And even though you have residual trauma related to the way she came into the world, you would do it all again in a heartbeat.
So, in the words of your wonderful therapist: go gently.
What lays ahead is unexpected. But believe me, the love and the joy far outweigh the trauma.
All will be well.
Love,
Laura in December 2020