Leah McLaren

Newborn Notebook

Looking back, it’s baffling that someone like me — a lover of pleasure and loather of pain, a woman who pops Nurofen like breath mints and cannot sit on the sofa without six cushions wedged in at strategic angles for maximum telly-watching comfort — would have deluded myself into believing I was going to give birth gracefully in a state of natural bliss. Regular readers of this magazine may recall I’d decided on a home birth. In preparation for the big event I lined up two community midwives, scented candles, a self-hypnosis CD, a full-bodied Barolo and a birthing pool, which by 40 weeks, Rob could unpack and inflate in our living room in six minutes flat.

Needless to say it didn’t work out like that. After seven hours of spectacularly painful labour (people who say it doesn’t hurt if you ‘breathe’ are lying or insane or both) the midwife informed me that my baby was breech and I would have to be rushed to hospital immediately to avoid a grisly scene from a Victorian period drama playing out in the middle of our flat. I burst into tears — not of disappointment but happiness, because it meant I could have drugs without the indignity of begging for them. After that it was paramedics, gas and air, epidural, 14 more hours of painless labour and an emergency c-section. I spent the entire surgery chatting manically to the anaesthetist about celebrity baby names while Rob held my hand and sweated. Before we knew it — shazam — a perfectly healthy son was plucked from my abdomen and plopped on my chest. I was, for once, speechless. Who was this slippery little tree frog sucking on my chin? It occurred to me I was going to spend the rest of my life finding out.

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