I tell this story today because tomorrow is about her.
Tomorrow my daughter turns 10.
I had a birth plan the way most first-time mothers do: quiet music, no pain medicine, the chance to help bring her into the world with my own hands, and a husband beside me. I did not ask for much.
My body and the universe had another plan. Bed rest at 3 months. A high-risk pregnancy I still somehow believed would end the way I wanted. They induced me a little early and I labored for 31 hours while the contractions refused to slow, every 30 to 60 seconds in the last stretch, my body topped out and stuck at 4 centimeters.
My parents and sister were in another state. The husband who was supposed to be there spent most of my labor โworking.โ
He was cheating.
After stubborn hours of fighting the inevitable, they took me for an emergency cesarean.
The first cut, I heard the doctor swear. The room changed. Blood left me faster than they could replace it, the anesthesia failed under the sudden loss, and I felt every cut, every hand inside me, while the team worked 45 minutes before the bleeding stopped.
Hazel arrived at 4:09 in the morning.
Loud. Beautiful. Perfect.
That was not the end.
Within a day I was septic, fever 105, blood pressure through the roof, shaking I could not stop. They rushed me back toward surgery and I asked the doctor if I would live. He hesitated, then met the demand in my voice and said it was possible I would not. He put a pen and paper in my hands so I could write my loved ones, and leave my daughter the only words she might ever have from me.
In the prep area he came back, set his pride down, and admitted that if he did the surgery I would not survive. They were flying in a womenโs health oncologist from California. I was under the knife for 9 hours. The infection had eaten a hole through my uterus and spread through my body, and at 27 a hysterectomy was what it took to keep me here.
I started to turn a corner and then became violently ill again as the sepsis moved into my intestines. By the time they got that under control she was 4 days old. I never changed her first diaper, never gave her first bath, never breastfed her. I held her once, and even that was a blur; after that there were only timed visits.
My abdomen was left open from the cesarean incision to above my navel. She went home before I did, and the time away from her was a heartache I still cannot name. They fitted me with a PICC line, a wound vac, and an IV and sent me home with nursing while the wound closed slowly over the next 2 months.
Every year around her birthday my heart holds two things at once: a gratitude so large it barely fits, and a despair that still knocks the air from me.
My body has been a battleground my entire life. It carries me through, and it has also stolen so much. I lost the children I dreamed of after her, the husband I married, and a part of my heart I will never get back. And I would live that horror again and again for one more whiff of her scent, her little hand wrapped around my finger, her mouth against my neck, without a second thought.
I still believe there is no greater calling or blessing than to be a mother. No other title or experience holds a candle to it.
I faced the end of my life in a cold room with a pen in my hand. Now I look at her face and the same story becomes light.
Happy 10th birthday, Hazel.
You were worth all of it. You still are.