Costa's Birth Story
“Real isn't how you are made. It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’
'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.
'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don't mind being hurt. It doesn't happen all at once. You become. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
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I am writing this story over a month and a half late because I am a cliché- a tired mother of three little kids who is recovering from mastitis for the second time in three weeks. I am slightly relieved my kids are asleep because I get some time to myself and also because this is the only time I have right now to miss them. I hope the middle one doesn’t fall out of bed tonight and that the baby sleeps until 3 a.m. instead of 1:30 a.m. My husband is watching something on his phone that sounds like a QVC channel for boats. I have a Haakaa Cup suctioned to my left boob and a half empty hard cider sitting next to me. This may be the only time I have to write this story.
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I had my third baby in the quiet of night during an August heat wave. I had my third baby surrounded by my OB, a few nurses and my husband. I had my third baby when I had already been a mother for awhile.
We had just moved less than a week earlier, Corona Virus or COVID, as I’d begun to call it, like the infectious disease specialist that I am, was running rampant. These were urgent days- hot and rushed- each one with an objective: don’t get sick and finish moving. Nostalgia was hanging on me, begging to be acknowledged, but I was too busy to say goodbye. The house would still be there whenever we came back with a baby, even if we didn’t walk through those familiar doors with him. I think my water had been leaking for three days before I did anything about it. Sentimentality wasn’t the only thing I was denying. We finally went to the hospital on a Wednesday morning. I hadn’t had breakfast yet, but Scott and I agreed to go to Chipotle after we would surely be turned away from the hospital with the humbling truth we both expected- I had just been peeing myself. We never made it to Chipotle. I was admitted that morning just before noon. It wasn’t pee after all, (what a relief).
Between noon and 1 a.m. I got induced, snuck Triscuits and hid them under my hospital sheet every time a nurse came, watched an entire marathon of ‘Renovation Island’ and texted my friends about how relaxing this all actually was, despite the contractions, because of the air-conditioning, the lack of needy hands and the cable TV. By 10 p.m. I got the epidural. By 1:33 a.m. he was here.
He was 7 lbs 7 oz. A sneaky little baby, arriving quickly after a few pushes. He came into the room like a bird that flew in through the window. He looked around, taking in the new world cautiously, then fell asleep, content with staying.
Everyone left after we were settled, backing out the door, wheeling the circus of instruments and adrenaline behind them. And there we were, woozy with exhaustion, buoyed by heartache, the hush of night creeping in past the hospital curtain so that the baby’s first small breaths could be heard over the eerie beeping machines of the 21st century. It never really feels like the same time period when a baby comes, though. It doesn’t feel like a world dappled with sickness and mean tweets or something called TikTok. It feels like living in a puzzle you’ve put together a hundred times, but only in dreams. Now you see the father, his thick hair with a shine of silver from all the suitcases and feelings he’s carried, the other children superimposed in the background, waiting eagerly for their new roles, and the mother as holy and happy as any Virgin Mary painting you’ve ever seen, but three times as sweaty. And there’s the baby that makes the whole picture complete.
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Tonight, while I was giving our six-week-old a sink bath, I realized that he was my son, too. Of course I felt him pass through my body, but some part of me thought I was just caring for him until the day he’d be ready to go off with Scott and begin their father/son adventure. I looked at his innocent little green-brown eyes and realized I was part of him too. It felt shocking. Like I was seeing him for the first time all over again. I’ve never known a man at such a vulnerable age- let alone one I would have so much influence over.
He wants so little from this world. What a refreshing thing. He probably knows more than I do-this skinny little Buddha with baby acne. He has such effortless gratitude- like I have for him.
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I’ve been thinking about that Velveteen Rabbit quote lately. It’s in another book I love, Waiting for Birdie. I joked with my friend the other day that I deeply resonate with this quote, especially if it said ‘and your vagina drops out’ instead of ‘eyes’. “Yes, much more literal” she responded. I’m not really sure when I became real. Maybe it was during the hours of stagnant labor with my first born. Maybe it was in the time after with the crying and the milk soaked t-shirts; pacing around the dining table in the dark with a baby that would not burp. Driving out to the lactation consultant, looking for parking with a screaming alien in the backseat.
Maybe it was in the night after my second daughter was born, when she wouldn’t settle and the nurse said, “Just tuck her in your shirt,” so I slept with her in the crook of my arm and I swear she’d still be there now if she’d fit.
Maybe it was after the miscarriages or in building this house during the pandemic and moving and carrying the boxes that ultimately led to my going into labor.
My mama heart has never really been dormant. I’m one of those people who has always wanted kids. And as much as it feels like a choice, parenthood also happens to you a hundred different ways. Those are usually the very best things.
