900 days

I will destroy you if you touch me!

And they’re off!

Everything happened so fast in the end: Saturday, November 22, in the morning, 2am, light contractions started. By 7am we were still joking at home, by 12:30pm Esmé Maria Francesca Willerich was born.

It’s nice to be part of an uncomplicated birth; we had heard so many stories about complications in all sorts of ways, we almost forgot that the bulk of babies are still born without a hitch.

A day later Baby and Baby Mama were released from hospital, and the same evening my parents arrived to help out.

I can’t say enough how grateful we are. With both sets of parents living outside the UK we’re quite independent, although sometimes we felt it would be nice to have someone to fall back on. When birth was inching closer, it was clear that we definitely wanted somebody here. My parents were flexible and close enough to simply buy tickets for a convenient plane on call, and so they did after I called them right after arriving at hospital at 9 o’clock.

This first week or so they were buying groceries, making us breakfast and dinner as well as showing super-human patience with our very vocal daughter. That left us with figuring out the details of how hungry she really is (”very”, it took us until yesterday to get that one right), how long it takes for the umbilical cord to fall off (5 days, and day 5 is a bit smelly. The midwife said not to worry, as “it’s just rotten flesh, nothing unusual”), and how long it takes us to lose patience.

This last one took 3 days with me, with very little sleep and of course still recovering from the birth. I felt terribly frustrated that someone who is supposed to mean so much to me can give me so much grief. Esmé had, roughly up until today, not shown any signs at all if she preferred being around the house in my arms, or rather down at the pub with drunken strangers. Instead she learned in less than one day so many variations of cries that all puncture your heart and ears severely, and the lesson that took me another 3 days on top of that was that apart from diaper-changes, food (well, let’s talk about the top-up bottle another time), comfort and warmth there’s nothing I can do to help her, and that in many cases the big four are simply not enough to get her settled.

Again, my parents saved the day a lot of times, when Jen was so tired she’d almost fall asleep standing, and I was so tense I thought I’m going to break my jaw from clenching it too much. I don’t think I’m as good as my dad with singing songs to her yet; I don’t think I’m as good as my mum just stroking her belly and cooing, when the distance between her mouth and my ear is so little that all health and safety alarm bells would go off if this were my employment. These things are doubly hard when you think that everyone expects you to be in total (albeit tired) bliss after birth, when really giving birth was so far the easiest thing for us. But I’m getting there and today is the first time I’m carefully happy.  Just writing this makes me a little proud; and apparently that’s what I’ve been meant to feel since day one. Ah, I’ll get there soon.