Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.
Maybe writing about the dim past will ease me back into writing.
When I saw this prompt, memories pushed themselves up from forgotten synapses and I remembered giving birth and the first day I became a parent. What a strange and incomprehensible new world it was for me.
I’ll gloss over the birth part, which involved my spouse barfing all over the place and having to go to the ER, leaving me to labor alone (no family or close friends nearby), then included every possible birth intervention I thought I’d never have, leading up to an unplanned cesarean due to my “incompetent” cervix. I never felt so powerless and out of control.
Then, after the anesthesiologist nearly paralyzed me (and I TOLD him I had a slight scoliosis), I was presented with a small person who used to live inside me. I felt like I already knew him.
Being a new parent who’d just been drugged up, I mostly remember smells from the hospital, from me, and from the baby. I’d never been hospitalized before, and it was a smelly experience.
I fell asleep after the lengthy labor and being surgerized at 6 am, and they took the dang baby away from me. When I woke up, not only did I have to listen to some woman with no pain tolerance screeching about needing more IV meds, but there was no baby. How the heck was I supposed to get colostrum in him?
Well, I could tolerate pain. And I figured out how to drag my IV with me and went to find my damn baby. I’m sure that was a lovely sight. Too bad.
I found the nursery about the time some nurse ran up and said I shouldn’t have walked unaccompanied. But no one was paying me any attention at all thanks to Old Screechy and I wanted my child.
That got me the child, who I would not put down henceforth except to hand him to my spouse. He was in charge of diaper changes, which also came with new smells. I can smell breasted baby poop right now. Neither of us had ever changed a diaper before. All new to us.
I left that place as fast as I could and vowed to do everything possible to avoid getting cut open like that again, surrounded by people who just wanted me to hurry up before the shift changed. (Didn’t work out, but I sure tried.)
That birth experience was the first time I felt like my body failed me. I asked it to do something, breathed like a yogini, and did everything right, but I got the surgery anyway. I’ve always said I’m grateful to La Leche League for helping me succeed at breastfeeding after it taking 5 days to get my milk in and having babies who had to learn to open their mouths. It was healing to know my body could do something I asked it to do, after all.
This may have been garbled. I’m having some internal weirdness going on after being around a lot of negativity. Not the fault of anyone in my immediate family!
Daily Bird
There weren’t enough birds around to pick one! It was a dreary day with morning drizzle. I heard no birds this morning and only five when I tried again in late evening. Even the owl was quiet. Even the house sparrows were quiet! Gads! The loudest bird was the kingfisher, so I salute that bird for being out and about no matter what.
The Hermits' Rest 