Thinking Back...

So much to write, so little time. I have a small window of opportunity right now, morning nap time, but there is so much in my head that I would like to write about, so much that I have been thinking.
To begin with, I realize that I have never talked about her name, how we decided upon it. I have to say, it was surprisingly easy to agree upon considering two such head-strong people (and the fact that when I was pitching names like Maverick and Pixie I was getting nowhere with my guy, whose favourite choice continued to be Lucifer). She'd been home with us for 5 days or so, and we were still saying that we didn't know when people asked what her name was. We had bought a book the day I went into labour, a book of 20,000 names from around the world, something to peruse while we tried to hold out for Monday when the full midwifery team would be available and we could be assured our home birth(of course, my water broke at midnight that night and she was born at 10:02 am on Good Friday). It was the day after we had decided to stop stretch and sweeps, tired of the 'you're going to have a baby today' cycle of disappointment and I remember leafing through it and seeing the name 'Shyama' in the Indian/Hindu names section. I recall being instantly struck by its meaning 'dark beauty', thinking surely we would have a dark child and I thought it was so beautiful. Here is what the book says:

Shyama - Derived from the Sanskrit syama (black, dark beauty) The name is borne in Indian mythology by the daughter of Meru, the mountain at the centre of the universe. She is seen as an incarnation of the Ganges River.

It just seemed so fitting for us as people who love the mountains and the river, especially knowing that we made her in the midst of that fabulous river trip in the Yukon, surrounded by just that. Nahanni was a name we knew we liked, it was just so pretty and of course, Ez had been dreaming of the river for many, many years. I remember promising him once, years ago that if he hadn't yet done the Nahanni by the time he was 50 that I would take him there for his birthday - and now he is already talking of the trip he will take his girl on, to her namesake river, the year we both turn 50. Nahanni is a Dene word which means 'the people who wander the mountains and the valleys' and we also thought that appropriate. I remember holding her in my arms, still so new, me still so weak yet full of wonder about this whole new experience, whispering into her tiny ear 'Is this your name? Nahanni Shyama?' I wrote it out over and over again in the margins of the little book I was using to record her nursing times, like a schoolgirl practicing her married name with the teen idol she loved. I wrote it over and over, staring at it, saying it, letting the syllables slide over my tongue. I loved the sound of it, I loved the beautiful symmetry of its letters and the more we whispered it, the more it seemed to fit - and so that is how we chose her lovely name. It thrills me when people stop me to look at her, saying how pretty she is and asking her name. I have learned to love the little high I get when I tell them and they sigh - 'Oh, what a pretty name, that's beautiful!' - almost every single time; it's wonderful, just like her.

I have also been thinking that I have yet to write out how everything went on the day. You think you'll never forget the details of things, giant events like this, but as we were sitting on the patio on Granville Island the other day, Ez pointed out the balcony of the Sands, where he proposed to me and we realized that neither of us could remember what he'd said. It really illustrated the fact that even the most important details can slip away (although we did manage to recover it; for the record he said 'will you stay with me in this life so I can find you in the next?') You think you will never lose them, but you do. I was thinking of it the other day as I was lying with Nahanni in bed, looking around as she slipped into her dreams. I am trying to be very conscious of my time with her, of subjugating the desire to put her down and go do things, to remember that she will only be small for a very short time and that all the rest can wait. I try to relish every little moment with her in my arms, her small, silky hand in mine, her vanilla sighs in my ear. I had a flash of insight that told me that when she is twenty years old, I will scarcely remember this red room, these gold-trimmed doors, the feel of this time. It seems like something that will not go away, but I know that it will, so I try to capture it, ethereal as it may be; I try to bottle it like a magic elixir of the heart. I take pictures, I write about it, try to etch it into memory but I know that just as the real memories of the intensity of her birth have already softened, so too will all the rest until there are only traces of them, like pencil lines erased that you can still barely trace with your finger. I know it's true because I finally watched the video of her birth and I was shocked by how intense it was, it truly stopped me in my tracks. I had already blurred the edges of that pain, placed a fine filter over the memories of the experience and seeing that video, the little snatches filmed from far back, I was still able to see what an incredibly intense experience it really was and I saw how my memory had shuffled and redealt the experience to me, it was crazy. I was shocked to see how, well, shocked I was, how clearly exhausted and overwhelmed and sort of dead, I was right after she was born. I had always imagined the birth of my child to be a huge emotional experience, tears and joy and smiles and laughter, but I could see that it was more sedate, more introverted, stalled almost. Ez handed her to me from below and I held her for a mere moment before they cut the cord from around her neck (mercifully loose as it was) and whisked her away. I am simply there, on hands and knees, gasping for breath, staring at my hands, now empty but covered in the red and white and cream of her birth. I don't rejoice, I don't weep, I simply collapse onto the chair in front of me, alone for a few moments while all eyes are focussed on her. You can hear Ez's voice cracking 'It's a girl! We have a girl!' as he returns to me, hugs me and covers me with a towel before going back to the baby's room where they are working on her. He tells me she is alert, they tell me her heart rate is 140 ("perfect") but I don't hear her at all - and in the early moments, I cannot believe that I don't care, I simply don't have enough life back into me yet. I ask soon after, and in watching it now, from this perspective of knowing her, I am frantic to hear her cry, but then, I was in a sort of fugue state, an exhausted, emotionally and physically overwhelmed trance. I was happy to see in the video that I do begin to come around shortly thereafter, obviously still tired but coming alive. I begin to talk to her as she gasps a little, trying to regulate her breathing as we both get shots - she Vitamin K and me Oxytocin as my placenta is not coming away (likely the cause of the severe hemmorhage that is waiting in the wings for me). I keep saying the same thing over and over again as if to soothe us both, "That was tough, wasn't it? That was hard." I do remember though, one true and shining detail - her eyes. I remember looking into her little face,her tired little eyes falling open and shut, and thinking how beautiful and long they were, how marvelously almond shaped they were, how exotic. I was blown away that she was a girl, so convinced was I that she was going to be a boy, and I remember thinking over and over 'I have a daughter!' and feeling gloriously happy about it, a little girl. Then there is a giant blank spot until we are in bed, the three of us, getting ready to settle into our day. Ez had cleaned up the worst of the birth and we were just about the share a Guinness and put the baby to breast when I began to have increasingly harsh contractions with gushing blood. I remember looking at Gill, the midwife, asking 'Is this normal?'. She assured me it was but as they grew in intensity it was obvious something was not normal. She suggested that it might be a full bladder and that I should try to empty it and perhaps that would make it better. She was helping me to my feet when I fainted, eyes wide open and fell back into the bed. I remember waking up, feeling like I'd slept for an hour, since the extreme pain of those contractions was now gone, and when I looked up, confused to see Gill still there, I saw Ez at the foot of the bed, eyes like saucers. I heard Gill saying 'Call 911' and I looked down to where she was palpating my belly and saw huge gushes of blood arcing out in waves and a clot the size of a football. Oddly, I remember thinking 'That's not good...' and certainly it was not. We went from a beautiful home water birth to an emergency evacuation in the space of an hour - not exactly the birth story I had been after. It was so many different things, snatches of memories I have. It seemed like an eternity for the ambulance to arrive while I tried to remain focussed and alert, knowing what I know about shock, I just knew that I had to stay awake. I remember how beautiful the blue sky was above me, the scent and the whiteness of the magnolias blowing in the breeze as they wheeled me out the front doors, the sound of the water in the fountains. I remember staring intently at a box of medicine in the ambulance cabinet in front of me, running the picture of the baby in her tiny pink hat over and over in my brain, willing myself to stay awake and see her again. Thinking of how scary it must have been for Ez to be driving with this one hour old infant in the car, following the ambulance with his wife in it, not knowing how I was doing at all. I remember thinking that despite them telling me I'd be okay, knowing that they would tell me that even if I were dying and that scared me. From there, the longest car ride of my life, the maze of the hospital, the fear, the fatigue, the poking, the prodding. It was a series of small intrusions, the IVs, the stitches, the cold speculum, the horror of a catheter that they could not get in, the area already so swollen and traumatized from birth. But most of all, I remember just waiting for Ez to arrive, to see him again, to see her. I remember him coming finally around the corner, his red sleeveless vest and black baseball hat (Sin for Sale) holding this tiny little bundle, her pink striped hat the only part I could see and I burst into tears to see him - and what we shared in that look said everything, everything that we'd been through in those last hours, those last days, in all the years we'd been together. We'd been tested that day, more than any other day in our lives and in that one shared look welled up every emotion we'd ever felt about each other and everything we were going to feel about this beautiful, vulnerable baby girl. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he cuddled her close in his arms, a tiny white bundle. "We're here", he said, and it was all I needed to know.
Thinking back on that day, I remember thinking 'How could we ever part after that?' and I think it illuminates something that we both learned and want to hold dear from that experience - that we had been through something so challenging on our first day as a family, we really need to try to always keep it present in our minds. To harken back to that day is to remember that we are able to rise to the greatest of challenges, that we are strong and powerful, that we need each other, that we fought to be a family. I think to hold onto the power of that experience is a way of reconnecting to why we are together as a couple, why we chose to start a family, and what we went through to have it. There will be days when we are not in love, days when Nahanni is not the placid little angel of these early times, and it will be in those moments of weakness that we will most need to recall the power of that day and what it meant to us. There will be many more challenges and difficulties along this golden road, but hopefully ones of this magnitude will be few and far between and the lessons of this day will carry us through them. I admit freely that the drama was something I did not want, it was certainly not part of my birth plan to have hemmorhage and an ambulance ride and three days in hospital and 2 bouts of mastitis and all that went with it, but I will not say that I would necessarily change it. The hardest times in my life have always been the times I learned the most from and I know this is no exception. I still fell blessed and honoured by this whole experience and I can honestly say - it was worth it. I need only look into my daughter's ever-changing eyes and know it to be true.