Welcome

After 9 long months, Wyatt Alexander finally made his way into the world on March 15th, 2011 at 9:56pm weighing in at 7lbs. 12oz. and 20 inches long.

The journey for him was a slow one. I entered the hospital around 5:30am at 3 centimeters dialated and the doctor broke my water at 7am. Twelve hours later, I was only a centimeter further dialated than I had been that morning. Plans were in the making that a C-section may be in order as the doctor started thinking that perhaps my pelvis was too small to pass the baby's head. She did another exam and manipulated his head a little bit and within an hour I was dialated the remaining 6 centimeters and ready to push. Twenty minutes later, Wyatt's tiny head emerged with the umbilical cord doubly wrapped around it. The doctor was able to quickly cut it away and attribute it to the reason he had been so slow to descend. Thankfully, aside from causing him to rock the labor casbah a little slower than expected, no permanent damage occurred.


He is absolute perfection.

Creaks

At nine months pregnant, I am still trying to arrive at a place in my mind where it is acceptable and even encouraged that some days I do nothing. Nothing typically consists of reading, tinkering about online, catching up on digitally streamed episodes of television shows I no longer watch for my loathing of the actual television set, perhaps a delicious afternoon nap. I have learned in my preference for silence, aside from ticking clocks, organic sounds that permeate the house walls from outdoors and the intermittent bleep of my cell phone, that this house creaks. The house is specific with its creaks saving most of them for the evening hours as the silence becomes muffled by the fading sun, particularly down the hallway. Numerous occasions have found my dog and I casting glances towards the hall in search of the entity causing the creaks, how they mimic footsteps. Our eyes'searches always turn up only the quick shadows of black and white photo's lining the long wall, silver and matte black photo frames of varying sizes and shapes. The silence and creaks, thought to reassure one that soaking in a lazy river of nothingness is acceptable at nine months pregnant, only validates my guilt. Things have been done. Over the past few weeks I have cleaned out and reorganized my pantry, begun painting the nursery, taken photo's, listed auctions, and shipped numerous packages, not to mention designed, photographed, and listed jewelry all in the name of extra income. I have hung up clothes that have remained in piles at the foot of my bed or dangling from an abandoned eliptical machine propped behind the door that I have also listed for sale. I have read several books, blogged recently, washed baby clothes until I was completely intoxicated with the delicately fresh scent of the bundle of joy floating around in my swollen belly that I am soon to meet. Despite all of that, the guilt of doing nothing festers in the small, dark corners of my stomach not already occupied by the baby. I am still trying to learn how to breathe which is difficult to do when you're suffocating.

Smudges of Waterproof Mascara

It is the memories and images that randomly come to mind that make it so hard to forget. The telephone call where I found myself out of character, vulnerable as I tearfully pleaded for him not to do what he was about to do which, in turn, elicited his own tearful response that he had to go. It was too much for him to bear, this was left unsaid, a given. The desperate and lonely bathing sessions, crying until it felt impossible that another tear could fall before it started up all over again. Trying to gain my composure, defeated by what was out of my hands, mindlessly staring at the sudsy water, which I could see clearly even through the tears, smudges of waterproof mascara, unlike my inability to see this coming. The feelings of being abandoned, the emptiness, the only relationship I could honestly describe as amazing, over without warning. Blind-sided. The songs that incessantly played their melancholy over the airwaves at all the wrong times while explaining exactly how I was feeling, reminders. "It's a quarter after one and I'm all alone and I need you now," lyrics that still bittersweetly sting me. Text messages, misleading but with drops of hope, that he missed me paired with the instantaneous thought that he was laying beside her, skin to skin, as he quickly punched the words into his phone. It didn't prove to be enough to turn photo frames over, they stared back at me when I lay in bed bragging that they encompassed everything that I loved. I packed them away along with everything else that refreshed my memory, as if the fragrance of them could be stifled by the stench of moth balls, forgotten if removed from sight. Aside from my broken-heart, my spirit had taken the brunt of the damage. Perhaps outside of the hurt that still resides in me most of my resentment is internalized for temporarily forgetting that he was human, thinking he would never hurt me like this. Trusting. I knew better. I allowed myself to get hurt. Just once though, I wanted to be the chosen one, the one so deeply loved that hurting me would be unfathomable. Perhaps I romanticize the capabilities of mankind, or rather their incapabilities. It is possible the books that I so often lose myself in have instead caused me to lose myself to the thought that true love exists...not the diluted euphoric love that eventually wears off after the honeymoon, but genuine love. The ultimate fact is that this broken spirit is simply harboring the paralyzing fear that it just wasn't meant for me.