Being a Mom is not at all what I thought it would be. I found that when you have a baby, much less a complicated birthing like I did, that more likely than not, you get overwhelmed with people coming and going in the room. Whether that be in a home, a hospital or a birthing center. I had a fast onset of Preeclampsia and couldn’t eat or drink anything for two days before I had my daughter. I was poked and prodded for days before and days after her birth. I was in the hospital for four days before she was born and had my blood drawn every 2-4 hours and then 9 hours of non medicated labor before I got an Epidural and then three more hours of labor before she was born.

She was so small I didn’t think that she would live. I had never seen a baby that small in person. she fit in my hands. she weighed in a total 3 pound and 12 ounces and 17 inches long. I didn’t cry like I was told I would. No reaction is the same for any parent. NO Birth is the same.

After she was born I was poked and prodded more. I was told that I had a couple more hours to be on my Magnesium drip and then another 24 hours before I could see or hold my child. Those where the hardest hours of my life. In total it was about 36 hours before I got to see her. Thankfully my husband was with her most of the time and would feed her and change her every chance he could. He didn’t want to let the nurse do it if they didn’t have too. He would then come back and tell me all about her and how she was doing and who had gone to visit her.

Meanwhile, my whole life was up in pieces. I was an emotional wreck even more so than I should have been because I wasn’t allowed to see her or hold her. My family and friends would come and go and sometimes stay way too long. I had to tell many people that I needed to rest and needed to be alone while my husband was rotating people in and out of the NICU, to see my daughter. Still to this day it is super hard for me to have a great bond with my daughter. I feel guilty about it a lot but I am dealing with it by going to counseling.

When we brought her home, 19 days later, we also moved back in with my husbands family. We at the time lived in a rental house in the middle of nowhere. We were and hour and twenty minutes from and hospital. We didn’t have central air and heating. We had a wood stove and that was it. I miss the space and having our own house but I am super thankful to his parents for helping us. They stepped up the the plate like no other grandparents I have ever known to do. When Jonathan and I had been up all night fighting sleep with a colicky baby, who was also super tiny, My father in law would take over so we could sleep.

I went back to work three weeks after having her. I would work night on the weekends and mornings on week days, five days a week. My husband was fired from the church without warning. Also without the SPRC’s knowledge, which if you are a member of the Methodist church, you know or should know that you cannot fire or hire anyone without going through them. Only three people knew about it and it hurt a lot. My husband waited to tell me till I got home. So I picked up more hours and he went to school. His teacher later found him a job.

He started school in the mornings and then would drive an hour every day to work. He would work a full 8 hours and then be home by 3 am. He finally and thankfully started staying with his sister who lived a few blocks from his work. He would then come home on Saturday afternoon and stay till Monday morning. I would work Saturday morning and come home and change clothes, say hello, relax for maybe an hour or two, then I was on my way to my second job.

His parents would keep her while we were at work. Two months into working two jobs, I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t sleeping at night during the week because working nights on the weekend would throw my sleep patterns off. I had to give up my night job. Since Jonathan was working and going to school, I could afford to do that. I would record his text books for him so he could study on his way to work and then take his test and not fail. We did that and barely parented for the first 5 months.

Thankfully, he is now out of school and just working, not only that, he is working day. That is still a few weeks new to us. I am so thankful that he can come home and help with the baby and help put her down for the night even.

We are still learning how to parent and how we don’t want to parent. Meaning, that there are things that our parents did with us that we do and do not want to do with our children. We don’t want to raise our voices to or at our children or each other while the children are around. Even though we have never yelled, raised our voices, or fought in the two years we have been married. We still don’t want that kind of thing around our children. We also don’t want our children to be afraid of calling us for any reason when they are older.

We want them to be able to go to a party and if they do things that they aren’t supposed to do, call us and let us know that they aren’t able to drive home and they need us to come get them and to know that they aren’t going to get yelled at or punished right away. We want them to know that we will always be there to catch them when they fall or to help them get back up but not to enable them. They can stand on their own two feet and we will be right there helping them stay strong.

Child birth is hard. It is an emotional roller coaster. There is almost nothing that can prepare you for it if you haven’t been a mother before. I can only hope that the next child I have will be a lot calmer during the birthing. Being a parent is scary. You are not only scared of what you might do wrong but you’re also scared of doing things right but too soon or not soon enough. It is a learning curve for us all. No parent knows it all with the first one or the last one. All we can do is to try something and if it doesn’t work, try something else.