Now that I’ve had the baby, I’m for the first time getting to actually see what life is like as a mom. For the past few months, I’ve been struggling to keep up with my writing and worrying about how my writing habits might diminish once the baby arrived. The funny thing is, despite the fact that I have to be up every two hours to feed her—which means part of the time when baby is asleep, I’m asleep, too—and despite my other commitments, I still have more spare time than I would have otherwise expected, time I can easily use to write.

And on top of that, I’ve had this amazing experience to write about—I now know what it’s like to deliver a baby! Delivering a baby is one of those things that nobody can ever quite describe clearly. People will tell you that labor is insanely painful or that once you reach a point where you’re able to push you feel much better, or they’ll describe somewhat vaguely the complications that arose during their labor, but, maybe because memory is weak and flawed, nobody that I ever talked to was able to give me a clear idea of what labor and delivery would actually be like.

As a result, like most women, I went into it pretty terrified. When my water broke, I sort of knew that my water had broken and that I needed to head over to the hospital, but I was so afraid of what would happen when I got there that I convinced myself that maybe it wasn’t time, after all, so I called the hospital to describe to them what had happened. Of course, they told me I needed to come in right away, and eight hours later my baby was prostrate on my chest for our first ever skin-to-skin bonding.

The whole experience was world shaking, like nothing I ever could have imagined. I don’t hold many idealistic views about natural childbirth, but I ended up deciding not to use pain medication. I had made up my mind in advance that I wouldn’t go into it having already decided to use drugs, but that I would let myself decide based on how I was feeling at the time. That said, I pretty much assumed that I would, eventually, ask for an epidural, I was just hoping I would hold out long enough so as not to increase the risk of needing pitocin, which increases the chances of having a C-section. But, painful and exhausting though the experience was, it was never so bad that I felt I needed something to take the pain away (and good thing, too, because it’s quite possible that not having pain medication saved my life. I developed a rare but very dangerous syndrome immediately after delivery, which was caught and taken care of right away, thank goodness, only because I was hurting in ways and places that I shouldn’t have been hurting. Had I been somewhat numb to the pain, I might not have said anything, so my midwife wouldn’t have known to check me for the problem).

So I really had the whole, unrepressed childbirth experience. That eight hours of my life (and actually, the four days that followed, during which I was confined to a hospital bed, hooked up to all kinds of monitors and IVs, while trying to manage breastfeeding and getting to know my baby for the first time) gave me tons of material to write about in my letters to my baby. The words still aren’t flowing from me with no effort, the way they used to, but still, I have something I want to say, which is in itself something of a miracle, compared to the way I've been feeling lately. I can go back later and revise what I’ve written to try to make the language more lyrical and the imagery pop, but for now, I’m glad that the experience was so mind-blowing and that I’m left with a burning urge to get it all down now, before it all begins to drift away from me, as it inevitably will.