Milo

Milo
Is that a smile I see before me?

Monday, June 18, 2007

Hello

Hello Oscar or Isabelle. I don’t know who you are yet, girl or boy, or even if those are the names we’ll finally plump for when you’re born, but hello all the same.

I was going to start this in March, when I got pregnant, but things conspired to get in the way. You, mainly. Three months of feeling like death. 24-hour nausea, the distinct impression I’d been flattened by a steam roller and all the life s q u e e z e d right out of me, ppffff, just like that, all my energy disappearing as vapour into the air.

As it turned out, I got it easy. Morning sickness (nausea aside) was something I didn’t suffer from. And as for the tiredness, well, that seems to have abated and my energy levels are returning to normal.

So that was one reason I didn’t put fingers to keyboard as soon as I found out I was pregnant. The other was that I suddenly became aware of the fragility of this new life growing inside me. It seems like the first thing you stumble across when newly pregnant are dire warnings of miscarriage – one report quoted a figure as high as 25% of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage. I never thought it would be so hard – naively, I just thought the most difficult part was getting pregnant. The rest, well, the rest would be fairly straightforward, surely?

There are a thousand magazines and websites and books that delight in telling you otherwise. That tell you horror stories of all the things that can and do go wrong. Of all the tests, the things you should do, and the things you really shouldn’t.

I am an obsessive reader. So I made myself sick with stats and reports and articles and features and blogs and weblinks of all the things that could possibly, maybe, go wrong. And then I thought that starting this blog to you, this diary of your life that you’ll never otherwise know, was too early. It would be tempting a fate that lurked, at the edges of my life, waiting to pounce and to take you away.

But we’re four months in. 16 weeks. You seem to be hanging on in there. Making me feel terrible, yes, but hopefully making yourself bigger and stronger. And I saw you: on my 12 week scan. You were scampering about, kicking the s**t out of my bladder and bouncing up and down as if my womb was your personal trampoline. When the woman doing the scan clocked your non-stop wriggling she said, ‘Hmmm, good luck with that!’

Good luck indeed. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed, honey, that you’ll make it, that you’ll be OK. I’ll love you whatever, and already I’ll love you forever.