Today is Neila's five-month birthday. I am excited, happy, and amazed all at once! I can happily accept that she has grown so much and learned so many new things; the part that shocks me is that I gave birth five months ago! It seems like it happened both forever ago and just yesterday. Some things I can hardly remember feeling (like the physical pain) and others are still as vivid as on that day.
In preparation for Neila's homebirth, we chose not to take any birthing classes and instead opted to read several birthing method books (The Bradley Method and Birthing From Within) and read a trillion birth stories. This turned out to be the best preparation for us because I went into the birth knowing that I had to let my body do its thing. I gave in to every whim and made every sound my body wanted me to make. It was liberating! Gone were the ideas that I would look cute and refreshed when my baby first saw my face; instead was the reality that we both looked messy, scattered, alert, and, ultimately... in love. This truly was a rite of passage for both of us.
The best moment of that day was lying in our bed, all three of us, in awe of what had just happened. We were overcome with joy and elation and surprise. Something for which we had been waiting so long, had taken just one day to arrive. And there we laid, transformed from a married couple into a family.
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