Not as brave as you were at the start

"But it was not your fault but mine
And it was your heart on the line
I really f**ked it up this time
Didn't I, my dear?
Didn't I, my dear"  

- Mumford and Sons, Little Lion Man

Let me start this by stating that I'm fine, on a day to day level, it's all going okay. Life has settled into some sort of routine and my penchant for procrastination hasn't gotten me into too many arguments. This isn't a whine, it's a vent. I just needed to get out some of the stuff I haven't been able to admit.

I'm a bit more broken than I used to be. I've always had more chipped mugs than skeletons in my closet, but now I'm having to glue the handles back on to most of them too. Having a premature baby shook all of them, all the vulnerable things I'd spent years bolstering with flour paste, sticky back plastic and bubble-wrap. Shook them hard that they fractured, little cracks that weakened, made them fragile but from the outside they still look whole.

My son escaped the Mother-ship out of the emergency exit hatch, I didn't give birth to him, he was extracted by a crack surgical SWAT team. My womb was holding him hostage and slowly withdrawing life support, my cervic hostile to the mere idea of induction and so he had to be rescued. I failed him, I failed to nurture him, I even failed to get him into the school year he was supposed to be in.

He was born on August 27th 2011, I had developed pre-eclampsia with HELLP syndrome and he was smaller than he should have been. I swing wildly between resenting them carving him out of me when everything was stable and being so grateful we didn't wait for a tipping point. Because we're both okay now. Honest.

Most days Sprocket himself is the glue that I can use to hold it all together, he's a constant amazement. Confounding, clever and a joy to be around. Of course he's tiring, he's 8 months old, he's trying to do so many things at once, of course there are moments I could cry...Like 4am, when he's determined to be awake and teething and crying all at once. He makes everything better, the balm on wounds. He makes me want to be a better mum, a better person. I don't want to fail him again.

I need to learn how to keep a post to a theme, to a chronology...But for now, i just needed to get that out of my system.

A work in progress

The moment before you were born,
was free climbing, parachuting, deep sea diving

All the scary things I'd never done
All the fear I had rolled into one.

The silence of that first night
was endless, paralysing, just surviving
All the lonely moments I'd had combined,
All the lost things I'd never find.

The first time I saw your face
was the man on the moon, familiar, lost in space
All the stars I'd ever wished on,
All the hopeful moments just begun.

Avoiding the Obvious

I started this post with every intention of telling my birth story and talking about my August 2011, the month I fell down the rabbit hole into the dark wonderland of being a Mum to a premature baby.  There's no logical reason for my current reticence to write it down, there's no sad ending, we're so blessed with Sprocket. He's doing well and is hitting all the milestones we could have hoped for in a 7 month old (and some we didn't, like cutting 4 teeth at once). 

I think about it all the time, I look down at the face of my son and feel the now familiar pain of love. The sharp tug of fear and wonder in the centre of my body, bouyant joy weighted by the shadowy clouds of yesterdays storm.  A heavy love, with cement boots of guilt and failure that plagues so many parents, not just to those with babies born early. 

It was an ivy-love that grew up quietly until it had a strangle hold. Not the tidal wave I was expecting, there was already a tsunami of fear and uncertainty, my body shaking like a leaf even as I fought to smile and show the world I was fine. His face only glimpsed over an drape for a blinking second, smeared with my blood and undecipherable. 

I didn't see him again for almost 24 hours, save for the four pictures I was given by the unit. In those pictures I recognised him for my own. Now I want to be able to move forward, to let go of the anchor that keeps part of me stuck vulnerable and exposed on an operating table, to unhook myself from the drip-fed routine of the NICU, the sense of alienation. I'm still stuck in limbo. 

I don't want to live in my past, to always relive the dread alongside every milestone, that's why I know I need to force my face into the mirror that this blog is supposed to be. I want to exorcise the thoughts and experiences and hold them up to the light of scrutiny so I can try to discard the unhealthy ones and hold on to all the positives, and there are so many positives.

I'll get there.

A Beginning...

I've always been a person with a lot to say, never one to be short of several words where one would do. I wrote my way through my teenage years, expressing everything in swathes of poetry and stories, articles and scrawled journal entries. So when I found out I was expecting my first baby, in February 2011, I expected the floodgates to open and words to once again pour onto paper. I wanted to keep a record for my son, so when I found it almost impossible to fill the blank screen with anything meaningful I was flabbergasted.

The blog has been a seed in my head for months now, right from the time life caught me by surprise and due to my pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome, my son was born 7 weeks early and I found all the words, emotions and experiences blocked behind those firmly locked floodgates.  It's taken months to work up the courage to start and I'm, really hoping it'll give me the encouragement I need to find words again. To find my voice as a wife and mother not an emo-filled teenage. 

Why August Ever After? Well, just because that's how it feels. Everything happened in August 2011, I got married, we bought our first house - a real 1930's project and my little boy was born. In August life as I knew it stopped existing for 6 weeks, as I was hospitalised instead of honeymooning, and then the wait for Sprocket (what I will call my son here) to be strong enough to come home. After those six weeks I had to rediscover what life meant and what was important to me...I've been trying to work out my own happily ever after and I hope you'll enjoy sharing my not-so-fairytale with me.