Don’t knock other people’s achievement priorities. You can never know how they came by them.
Cody’s 1st Birthday
I could tell you about my degree, but everyone and their dog seems to be getting a master’s, if not a PhD, nowadays. Or the three foreign languages I’m fluent in (not to mention decent in a few more), but there’s talent involved there, which gives me a good head start. I’ve been abysmally unfortunate in money and work, so nothing to show there anyway. What I do have, though, is a lifetime achievement, literally. My son.
Big deal, some will say. Women have been having children since the beginning of time. And is it responsible to bring more children into this world?
I’m going to leave the latter for another time, much as I’d love to have a royal go at the lunatics who claim we have procreated enough, thank you, and it’s time to stop. I’m just going to mention that there’s no telling yet what my son will grow up to achieve himself. I may not even live to see it, but if he ends up creating a masterpiece of art or five, or finding a cure for cancer, or simply ruling the world, I will have earned my place in the fringe of his spotlight. But even if he’s nothing more than the decent human being I’m going to raise him as, merely having him is the crown of my life.
I was 35 when I fell pregnant with him. I had never been pregnant before. Theoretically, I could have been perimenopausal already, and gone on to ignore it until it were too late. As it was, he started on his way to me naturally, without any interference, or even much effort.
The trouble started about two months down the way. The first bout of crippling pain and reflexive vomiting was mistaken for a UTI and was treated with antibiotics. The second sent me to have an emergency ultrasound, to find out that an ovarian cyst, that had been diagnosed two years earlier, had grown and was beginning to get squished and/or twisted as my bump began to assert itself.
What was there to do about it? Absolutely nothing. Surgery to remove the cyst was out of the question, unless it was a life-threatening emergency, like if the cyst got strangulated. The pain attacks became more frequent, incapacitating me on average one day out of three. Despite the paracetamol I took, the pain took hours and hours to subside. Any food not completely digested when the pain started would come right up again. Onset was so sudden that I didn’t dare go to the supermarket alone because I didn’t know if I would make it back home. And the long hours of being alone at home, whether in pain or not, made me feel anything but safe.
With a view of spending seven months either in agony or in anticipation of agony, I took to going around everywhere with painkillers and water in my handbag, and not unaccompanied if I could avoid it. I had never before felt so helpless in my life. I could have coped if the pregnancy itself were making my life miserable, but my baby was being a darling who never subjected me to anything worse than mild nausea and a sharpened appetite for poultry. It was the secondary nature of the trouble, and the fact that I could not address it directly, that troubled me so.
As it turned out, the agony didn’t last seven months. By the fifth month or so, apparently, the cyst had been wedged somewhere out of the way, immobilised by the expanding bump, stopped giving me grief. Not that my precautions relaxed any. I saw either my midwife or someone at the antenatal unit of the local hospital every two weeks; I think that, by the time I gave birth, I had seen every doctor on the roster there. I had more ultrasounds, more bloodwork, and I was forbidden to travel. Road trips weren’t going to be an issue (especially since I don’t drive), but since I couldn’t fly, it took me almost a year and a half to go back to Athens to see my mum. I was very freshly pregnant when I went there for the first time since moving to the UK, and the next time my son was eight months old.
But despite the pain, the fear, the loneliness, the danger, my son was born just fine and is growing into a fine lad. And whatever else he grows up into, he has already taught me to live in uncertainty and not to give in to panic when trapped in situations beyond my control. The utter helplessness of labour, when it came, felt almost familiar. That’s one bloody big achievement, let me tell you.
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
