Five Tomorrow

My beautiful, funny, ridiculous son, who loves to rhyme silly nonsense words and make rockets out of old Weetbix boxes, is five years old tomorrow. At eighteen minutes past three in the morning, to be precise. It took me twenty hours, and considerable assistance to take him out of my body. Thankfully, the doctors and midwives left the shining thread that connects his heart and mine intact.

When I was pregnant with my boy, everything was new. He was my first baby, my first pregnancy, my first morning sickness, my first strawberry Big M craving, my first Braxton Hicks, my first feeling the baby kicking, my first threatened premature labour, my first completely and utterly absorbing, hungry love.

After the doctors managed to halt labour at 30 weeks, I spent the next 8 weeks on the couch, cooking my little bun. Every time I was on my feet too long, the contractions would begin again...so back to my couch I would go. I knew at the time it would be the last chance for a long time to sit and do nothing. I had no idea, though, how right I was!!

Due to ongoing complications, my induction began at 7am on April 14th. Like so many first-time mums, I expected to deliver naturally. I wanted to deliver naturally. A caesarean was not in my birth plan. As far as pain relief went, well...I was open-minded. Thankfully. Each to their own, and all that, but hindsight is a marvellous thing. I laboured beautifully, without pain relief, for about seven hours. When the midwife examined me in the early afternoon and announced I was two centimeters dilated, I was quite affronted. I had been two centimetres for weeks!!!! And given that they discovered at this point that Jack was posterior, I knew we were in for a rough ride.

After an hour in the shower, I asked for pethidine...and then for an epidural. I so desperately wanted to do without the drugs, but I had walked, rocked, breathed, showered, been massaged, joked, listened to music, and ommmmmmed my way through nearly a whole day. At this time the midwives told me I was in for at least another ten hours of labour. I think anyone who has given birth would understand my state of mind at this point!! The anaethestist apparently had been told an approximate ETA for Jack, as he gave me an epidural that eventually wore off. When he returned to find me panting through the contractions, with no sign of an emerging baby, he gave me a second epidural...which blessedly remained intact until the next day.

I was unaware of the panic which preceded Jack's birth. All I remember in the hour before we were scuttled into the operating theatre, was the obstetrician telling me I had tried very hard, but since I had been pushing for nearly five hours, it was time to let him help. I didn't want him to help; this was my baby. I had made him. I already loved him. This was my job. What we weren't to know, was that I would never be able to push a baby out. I am, in medically-unsavvy terms, built the wrong way on the inside. No baby would ever be born alive, no matter how long or hard I pushed. So after failed forceps, and five failed tries with the ventouse, we admitted defeat. And thankfully, blessedly, and finally, the doctors managed to save my baby by delivering him safely via scalpel. (Something I struggled with for years, until one day I had an epiphany. I wanted a natural birth. I did everything I could. I failed, and it wasn't my fault. And my son was born alive. End of story.)

Jack Albert Frederick O'Toole was born at 3.18am on the fifteenth of April, 2006. He weighed 8lb 8oz, and was 51.5cm long. And he was, and is, completely perfect. I was absolutely flabbergasted that my body could make such a perfect baby. His heart beat all by itself. His eyes opened and closed. His lungs worked. His fingers and toes and legs and arms all moved and flailed around, with muscles under the skin that I had made. And when I spoke to him, when they brought him to my face all wrapped up in a hospital bunny rug, he stopped crying. And opened two puffy, squinty little eyes, and looked at me. And we recognised each other.

And when the enormous wound on the back of head (from the ventouse, that essentially scalped him) healed, and the jaundice went away, and he discovered that breastfeeding every two hours was a marvellous caper, Jack was a fantastic baby. Happy, alert, sociable, cuddly. Jowls that hung down to his shoulders, so chubby was he. And then he was a gorgeous toddler, with curly blondey-red hair, and an obsession with Thomas the Tank and his baby sister Phoebe (or Fifi, as he dubbed her). And then he was a chatty three year old, who sang and danced and went everywhere with his yellow Wiggles guitar. And then he was a leggy, sweet-faced four year old who loved his second baby sister, went to kinder and learned big boys games like chasing baddies, and made endless rockets with blue fire out of cardboard cylinders and old bottles.

And now?

Now he is a beautiful boy, who will be five tomorrow. When we were in the car today, he said, "Mumma, I'm so incited about my birthday tomorrow (and he clenched his fists and wiggled them with "incitement") When I wake up tomorrow morning, I'll be five. But (and with this, he looked down and gestured at himself), I won't look any bigger, ok? I'll still look like this. But I'll be five."

Oh, my son. No, you won't look any different. When you wake up in the morning, and I watch you open your presents and share your glee with your little sisters, who idolise you, I will see the same thing I always see when I look at you. My firstborn baby, with velvety skin, enormous blue eyes, fists clenched tight under the bunny rug, and a baldy head. Somehow, the little bubba I gave birth to five years ago has morphed into a sweet, cheeky, long-legged, clear-eyed boy's boy. But he'll always be my 8lb bundle of joy.