Walk of Life

Despite the fact that I want to consider myself a person who loves nature and the outdoors, I am not always enthusiastic about actually being outside. I prefer to move through the world quickly, or at least as quickly as I can without being gasoline-powered. And, as much as I'm ashamed to admit it, I'm rarely one for hikes or nature walks. (Nature is just full of bugs, y'all.) I want to be a Patagonia model, ripped and muscular and ready to scale El Capitan in a pair of breathably stretchy linen technical pants; on the other hand, there is remarkably little TV in the forest. A year ago, the idea of going for a power walk just for the hell of it would have raised some puzzled eyebrows on my end. You just want to walk...around? Can't we just bike there? Or maybe get a coffee and read a magazine?

But having a baby changes things, and while NS is still in his infancy, we can't just stuff him in a pannier and bike around the city. We have to choose between transit, begging for rides, and walking. In the face of a TTC crush, or trying to work around our parent's schedules, sometimes it's just easier to lace up our comfy shoes and put one foot in front of the other.

Surprisingly, I've taken to city walking. We've done five big, multi-hour, multi-kilometre walks in the last week, mostly with NS napping in the stroller as we push him through the city. He sleeps remarkably well as we roll him over the sidewalk's cracks and bumps, and the noise of the traffic doesn't seem to bug him at all. Meanwhile, we get to chat with each other (not always possible on bikes), and pop into different little storefronts on a whim, and get a refresher course on the city we've lived in for years. Things change, block by block, and from a car or on a bike, it's not always possible to tell how.

When I lived in Stratford, we used to walk through the Dolan, a natural area bordering the cemetery, with a river and everything. Dolan walks were the sort of thing we'd do after Easter dinner, when we'd been eating for days; the ground was always muddy and the trail was halfheartedly maintained. The forest is never my favourite place to be. You never know when you're going to come across some sort of spider family reunion. But it was nice to be outside, getting our shoes wet, poking through the underbrush.

More often, we'd take family walks at Sauble Beach, which I loved, and still love. Sauble is a special place for my family: we've been there for literally generations (four now!), and the walk from our cottage up to the big bathrooms on Sixth Street is a five-times-a-week occurrence. Usually it's after dinner, as the lake is sequinned with a thousand gold and copper sparkles, and the beach is littered with other families doing the same: walking along the waterfront watching the sun go down. Sometimes, it's in the morning on a weekday, when the beach can be nearly empty. Or at night, when the wind whips up and we come back inside with our hair blown out. Powering along the sandy shore, a little buzzed on the wine we drank with our dinner, chatting about everything and nothing in particular, it's a special time.

Walking in the city is sweet, too. It's just that I miss the ionized wind coming off the water, or the deep-oxygen feeling of the forest. We are firmly inside the city—not close at all to natural features like High Park, the Don Valley, or the waterfront, where we could conceivably go and get our nature on. Ironically, we'd have to transit or drive there. And while Toronto might be "the city inside the park," as its signs boast, those parks are often micro-parks—a corner here, a roundabout there. A pocket of green tucked between two houses or behind a subway stop, not a rolling expanse where I might conceivably be afraid of an actual natural experience. Walking those parks take all of two minutes. It makes me ache sometimes for something more nature-adjacent.

But you know what they say: the grass is always greener, yadda yadda. Walking the city sidewalks is also a great thing. M wears the baby, or I push the stroller, and we explore. We're both working on losing our winter/baby/Netflix weight, and coming home with sore feet is a nice way to do that. If you had told me a year ago that walking would be such a source of physical pleasure, I would have scoffed. It's not going to get me ripped, that's for sure. But a gentle stretch towards health, before I try really getting back into shape, is so lovely. And doing it as a family? How happy we can be.

Life Among the Hipsters

I had been counting down the number of posts on Hipsters Are Boring, looking forward to the momentous (to me) day when I would publish my 500th post. And then I had a baby, I stopped sleeping, and my brain fell out of my head. Having a baby is like doing a mild hallucinogen all the time: time is dreamlike, sleep is fleeting, and parts of it are dramatically uncomfortable. A tiny person can make a lot of noise. And, in the midst of all that noise, milestones can get missed.

So, here we are: my 504th post.

It's almost seven years to the day after I started this blog. It's been my biggest writing project of my life so far—literally thousands of words, hundreds of posts, one semi-viral post about Jian Ghomeshi, and over 200,000 page views. It started as a way for me to throw shade on hipsters, but has evolved into something else. It's a hybrid of personal writing and venting about the modern condition. It's often snarky and it's sometimes introspective. It's weird. I feel beholden to no one else when I write Hipsters. I feel no need to soften my voice or change my tone to suit some other editor's needs. It's where I feel most comfortable.

Hipster Are Boring is my hometown. It's where I'll always be from. It's the place where I can flop on the couch, crack open a cold can of Coke Zero, and talk about whatever. It's my oldest writing friend. Writing Hipsters has opened doors for me—an internship at Spacing magazine, and writing for Torontoist—and those doors have opened other doors. Those opportunities have given me a chance to dress my writing up, put it in a skirt and make it comb its hair.

It's taken me a long time to loosen up, to learn that, when I write for other people, I don't have to leave my sarcasm or my turns of phrases at the door. I used to think that my writing had to have a transatlantic accent: that any hint of my own voice had to be fluffed and flossed and smoothed and polished until it could be any old sap's byline; it just happened to be mine. And where did I learn how to do that?

Here, of course.

In a few weeks, I'm going to be launching a new writing project. It will reflect where I am now in my life—where my brain currently lives—and be narrower in focus. I'm excited to start something that feels slightly more curated than this shaggy, unwieldy blog...but I'm also excited to keep writing here.
In the inelegant backend of the Blogger website, against this never-changing background, I'll keep trying. Nobody cares if hipsters are boring anymore—we've moved past all that, with normcore and emo-rap and a million other post-hipster poses—but I damn sure care about Hipster Are Boring.

Share House

In 2004, I moved back to Toronto after taking a year off school. Moving home after my freshman year was kind of a reset button: I needed to recalibrate after a horrible, no-good, very bad first attempt at university.

Most of that terrible experience was wrapped up in where I lived. In September of 2002, I moved into an all-girls residence run by nuns. There was a chapel on the ground floor; there was a crucifix above every bed. Though I wasn't Catholic, I had selected this residence based on the University of Toronto's colleges system. U of T runs seven different internal colleges, each with their own personality and specialty. They're mostly administrative constructs—each one takes care of a residence or two, runs courses, and houses libraries—but they vary widely from college to college. St. Michael's, where I first landed, was an older, more conservative college; it wasn't co-ed, it housed much of the seminary and religious materials, and its buildings were old and beautiful and seemed to make for a luscious living experience. It also promised a literary magazine, which in my eight years at U of T, I never once saw.

Long story short, I hated it. The nuns were dismissive, the food was awful, and the sheer pulsing drama of housing 300 eighteen year old girls at a single address is impossible to overstate. I made more best friends in my first year than I ever had before; I also embroiled myself in several totally insane fights, one of which centered around if I had stolen a Diet Coke from the communal fridge (I had not). It was exhausting. It was too much, too close.

So I took a year off, moved home, and thought hard about where I wanted to be. When my year was up—and I had once again waited on enough tables to realize that I don't always enjoy people all that much—I moved back to Toronto, re-enrolled (albeit this time at a different college), and moved into co-op housing.

Co-op was a game-changer for me. I lived there for eight years, at three different addresses. The set-ups varied: I had a room in a house, an apartment to myself, and then shared a floor with two other girls. There were things in common at each house: shared chores; housemates I adored and some I didn't like at all; amenities like laundry and newspapers that were available to everyone. There were meetings, sometimes lots of them: house meetings, annual members' meetings, council meetings, board meetings. Co-ops distinguish themselves from private rentals by being owned and governed by their members, which means that keeners (like, um, me) can run for the board of directors and work with staff to actually run the place.

One of the perks of living in a co-op is the sense that things can change; one of the downfalls is that, often, change takes a really long time. I sat on the board for years, and the same conversations kept coming up: how to retain good members and sluice out poor ones; how to make sure revenues were high and predictable; how to orient new members to an oddly bureaucratic domestic life. At first, these conversations were inspiring, but after several cycles of new directors and new staff, they can get stale.

And besides, student co-ops are, by definition, for students. They're a little more malleable, and better able to handle close quarters. Aging out of co-op was a sad time for me, but I wanted to take the next step towards "adulthood." That meant moving in with my boyfriend, and resigning myself to the fact that, if we had kids, it'd be just the three of us in a rented apartment. Not a tragedy, but not the bustling housing model I was used to.

But then, a light shone out. In my final years of co-op, I stumbled across the co-housing model. Co-housing is similar to co-op, but with important differences: units can be rented from central group (like a co-op) or owned outright by their residents. They're often more private, such as stand-alone buildings grouped together, rather than apartments or shared houses. Since co-housing isn't common in Canada, it's often purpose-built rather than converted, and they tend to be privately financed rather than draw from grants or government programs. Since they're usually created from the ground up, the groups that start co-housing initiatives are often tightly knit, rather than the sometimes loosey-goosey group of residents that might live in a co-op.

But in important ways, they can be quite similar. Co-housing is usually run by people who want to live together, and who want a vibrant, interactive community. Housing units tend to be on the smaller side, and amenities are shared within the group (I've read about co-housing communities sharing trucks and cars, gardens, laundry rooms, play areas for kids, screening rooms, libraries, kitchens, and parks). Smaller houses tend to be less expensive to build, cheaper to maintain, and have a smaller ecological footprint; shared community elements double down on those benefits. Co-housing often offers programming, such as community dinners or internal child care, that are designed to reinforce the idea that, yes, we're all in this together.

As you've probably gathered, I am interested in co-housing. I'm interested in co-op housing, too, but there are far fewer administrative and legal hoops to jump through to establish a co-housing initiative, and all the co-op waitlists we're on are backed up through the end of the decade. Co-housing offers a chance to start fresh, maybe in Toronto (but more likely outside of it), with people we like, and in houses that fit our lifestyles. After years of living in small apartments, we could easily get into a small house (not a tiny house, mind you; just one with a smaller square footage), and we could design something beautiful and unique that suits us. This would be a step up from trying to contort our rented digs to fit our lives.

I'm picturing walls full of books, movies, and art with no landlord to give us grief about the holes in the walls; I'm picturing bathtubs that can actually fit an adult human being; I'm picturing a clubhouse for all the kids, with climbing walls, craft centres and rope swings; I'm picturing easy beers with neighbours, standing around as the sun sets. I'm picturing bike shares, dinosaur kale in the front yard, shoji screens in the bedroom, working hard to keep the community vibe alive, and feeling like we have a future in the place we are. Roots and leaves, together. And now, I'm starting to wonder who else might be picturing it, too.

15% Brain

Since 85% of my brain right now is baby pudding, I am feeling lazy and tired and sort of sanguine. Here's where the other 15% percent of my brain is:

• Holy god, I am going to get the diabeetus, but I'm mainlining chocolate and cookies and Jello cups like there's no tomorrow. I think maybe it has to do with breastfeeding, but it's unreal.
  
  
  
• I like our house, but I don't love our house. It's creaky, it always smells like weird soups (thanks, upstairs neighbours/landlords!), and there always seems to be some new structural deficit being uncovered. From blown fuses to gas leaks to negligent downstairs neighbours who set fires to underheated rooms to rotting back decks, it has some...problem areas. And the joys of being a renter means we can't really fix them. But since we just moved last fall, and we have a new baby, there's no real point in focusing on the negative. I just daydream about moving into a place where we have all four walls to ourselves.
  
  
• That being said, I find myself really homesick right now. I love my husband, I love our new baby, but I kind of just want to curl up in Stratford. I miss small-town libraries, local coffee shops, walks in the woods, car rides. I miss downtowns. I miss small-town high school kids, because their punkishness and their art-school airs never fail to make me nostalgic for my own shitty adolescence. I miss feeling like a big deal, because it's possible to feel that way in a small town.
  
  
• On that hometown thing: I think I actually miss the relative safety net of living at home and being taken care of. I'm feeling drained by the emotional work of just being around a baby all day long. The constant feedings, begging my screaming baby to tell me what's wrong, booking all the people who want to meet the little one, the lack of good sleep. It's exhausting! M is terrific at taking care of me, don't get me wrong. But right now, Toronto seems overwhelming in a way that Stratford doesn't. Plus: I miss my parents. Double plus: I'm now back at work, and I can't say that I'm stoked.
  
  
• The guy I had a major, red-alert crush on in high school has authored a children's book. I mean, come on. The last time I saw him, I literally hid from him in an art supply store, because it was like seeing a celebrity and I froze. I am such a bonehead sometimes. Anyway, the children's book thing: I've decided to not let it bum me that he's a fancy author; I'm going to use it as inspiration to follow my own dreams. Maybe one day, I can hide from him at a writer's convention!
  
  
• I can't wait to get back into working out. Not only is my post-baby gut a major bummer, but I'm getting all stiff and achy from sitting around all the time. But the upside to this enforced sedentary lifestyle is that we're burning through Parks & Rec in record time. Leslie Knope! I love her.
  
  
• I want to get a tattoo. I keep badgering M about getting something matching, but I also want one for me. I feel like it's nearly time.
  
  
• I have a new writing project. Details to come... 

Image via Fuck Yeah Paganism

Creative Juices

Maybe it's because I'm literally tethered to the baby seven hours each day while I nurse him, or maybe it's because I'm awake at weird hours, or maybe it's because hanging out with a one-month old baby is sort of tedious (they are terrible conversationalists, honestly), but since NS was born, I've been experiencing this burst of creative energy.

I keep thinking about tattoos I want, 'zines I could make, blog posts I want to write. I'm designing the floor plan of my forest getaway house (it includes a wall of books, an outdoor hot tub, and space for the three of us to chill on the deck). I'm thinking about writing, a lot. I'm thinking about how and where I want to make my money, where I want to live, the animals I want in my life, the people I value, the aesthetics that please me. And I'm thinking about how all of that reflection gets synthesized into making and doing, eventually. (Not now. Right now, I need another nap.)

This time in my life feels like a huge reset button. It is not a restful time or an easy process, and I'm resisting parts of it. Instead of feeling like a "mom," all natural and easy-breezy, I feel like this baby has crash-landed in our cabbage patch and I've been randomly selected to take care of him. I feel conflicted and confused by a lot of this new identity. Like, I want mom-friends, and I also feel like an asshole for seeking out people just because we happened to have birthed a child at roughly the same time. I want to adore this baby whole-heartedly, and I also find part of this time deeply boring and stressful. I want to be part of the crunchy-mom scene, but I have to use a breastfeeding pillow and my kid seems to hate being worn. I want to be free of things like despairing over my post-baby body, and yet, I look at myself and I think, "You fatty." I had a baby 24 days ago; my brain is not what it once was.

I think a huge part of becoming a parent and a mom is processing all the weird, hinky little details that have come up. For example: I have not yet mastered putting the baby into a stupid ring sling, even though it's literally a strip of fabric and there seems to be no real way to screw it up. And yet, here I am, screwing it up, listening to NS scream in my ear every time I try to jam his little feet into the carrier. I feel like a bad mom, that I can't intuit all these details about mommy-ness.

And I want to talk about it! I want to create art about it. But not just about motherhood. I want to make up more baby songs, but I also want to remember and reconfigure who I am as an adult outside of the baby-ness. Maybe I'm fooling myself by thinking it's possible to separate myself from this child right now, but there's a part of me that really wishes I could do that. And I think this creative energy, which is centered around stuff that I like and stuff I want to do, is part of that. It is daydreaming, it is fantasy, but it is necessary for my sanity.

A few weeks ago, when I was hormonal as eff and crying on the phone with my mom, she said, very kindly, "You have to put your own oxygen mask on first, you know." I've been struck by that—I have to take care of myself on the very basic levels (getting enough water, for instance. Breastfeeding leaves a bitch parched), but also on some of the higher levels, too. I need to read The New Yorker in bed, and I need to write, and I need to dream. And some of those dreams are family affairs, and some of them are just for me. They are my oxygen mask these days.

Two Weeks

 Things I know now that I didn't know two weeks ago:

Breastfeeding is hard. When I was a little girl, I yearned for big boobs. What I got were big, soft, large-areola'ed breasts that are more matronly than sexy, but whatever, it's fine. But those same big soft boobs are damned difficult for this baby to get a latch on. Every time I breastfeed, it's a complicated process of getting my hands, his head, my nipple, his mouth, all exactly in alignment. Also, I have ton of milk, so the poor little dude ends up getting sprayed, or choking, or getting his teeny shoulders hunched up with stress. It breaks my heart. This is getting slightly easier, but it's definitely been a challenge, and I can anticipate it continuing on that way for a while.

Postpartum sweating is a thing. Holy mother of God, I have never been sweatier in my life. I wake up to a mattress that has been soaked through; I get hot flashes when I nurse. I don't know why (I think it has something to do with the body shedding water weight?) but it's freaky-deaky.

TV you can ignore is key. We rewatched the first two seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and then moved on to Arrested Development. Having seen them all before multiple times, there's no real imperative to not fall asleep during an episode, but having the white noise and the comedy has been a real boon.

Having great friends and family is a treasure. In the past couple weeks, we've received soup, chili, cornbread, banana bread, cookies, macaroni and cheese, chicken stew, lasagna, quinoa salad, a fruit delivery, Polish donuts, nursing apparel, a hand-knit hat for NS, baby outfits, rides to appointments, and a slew of visitors who respect the fact that all we can do right now is 30-45 minute hangout sessions, and that I probably won't be wearing a shirt (#nursinglife). FYI: not having to cook is basically the best gift you can possibly give to new parents. When in doubt, bring food.

C-section recovery sucks. Surgery + no sleep + intense fatigue from labouring + emotional whirlwind + nerve damage + pain + coping with an unexpected procedure + figuring out how to process the loss of the birth I thought I would have = THE FEELS, both physical and mental.

Milk coming in = hormonal rollercoaster. A woman's body will produce colostrum, a super-awesome early milk that only shows up for the first few days of a baby's life. After that, she starts producing actual milk, but the transition between the two is a little bit...weepy. Okay, a lot weepy. Okay, I cried pretty much non-stop for 36 hours, including all over the baby.

The baby is going to cry. Our little dude is pretty mellow, but in the last couple days, he's really upped his squalling game. Why? I have no idea. Gas, probably. Or he's upset that Trump is leading the polls in New Hampshire.

I have never loved my husband more. Watching M these last fourteen days—the 3 AM diaper changes, the little songs when he's trying to soothe him, the dishes that get done, the snack bowls that appear beside our beds, the water glasses that get refilled, the chuckles when the baby farts, the gentle petting of my stretch-marked and scarred stomach—has filled me with such love. He's such a good dad, and it's amazing to me that, just a few days ago, he wasn't a dad at all.

I have Googled everything. Every time the baby does something, I Google it. I look it up in our childcare books. I text someone. Every damn time the kid does something new, or different, or makes a sound, or doesn't make a sound, or blah blah bah into the baby-related abyss, I'm right there on the Google-machine, trying to figure out if it's normal or if he's dying. (Spoiler: he's not dying.)

My instincts are actually okay. Everything from soothing to swaddling to sleeping, I'm like 80% okay at it. My encounters with breastfeeding experts (two lactation consultations, two midwives, multiple seasoned friends) taught me that nearly everyone subscribes to a slightly different school of thought, and will follow slightly different protocols. For example, the midwives told me to breastfeed every two hours; the lactation consultants said every three hours; the books I read said twelve times in 24 hours, whatever that looks like; my mom said don't wake a sleeping baby and the kid will let me know when he's hungry. By the end of my first week, I was a mess. But slowing down, and figuring out the timing that worked for us, really made a difference. And NS ended up gaining back his birth weight in a week and a half, a benchmark and milestone that made me incredibly happy.

This is the long game. The first two weeks have been a blur of cuddles and panic, of late nights and early mornings, of naps and walks, of trying to survive and thrive. We are learning this little baby; he's learning us. It occurred to me that I'm going to know this person for his entire life—aside from my younger siblings, there isn't anyone else I can say that about. And it fills me with joy, and nerves, to know that in a month, a year, a decade, there will be milestones that seem now like they're on the moon, and those days will come to pass before I can even catch my breath.

The Baby, the Birth Story, and the Love

Noah Stanley Kochany Cinovskis! The son, our sun, the boy wonder, our sweetpea, our little guy, our tiny friend, the kiddo. Noah.

They say that birthing a baby is like running a marathon. In my case, I feel like the marathon route unexpectedly zagged through a raiding party, and at mile 24, we had to wrestle a bear. Basically, if birthing was a movie, I am Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, and I would like my Academy Award now, please.

I started labour on a Thursday. At first, it felt like nothing, or maybe something...it was hard to tell, really. Mild back pain, coupled with some prodromal feelings of unwellness—the kind you get before you come down with a cold—kept rolling through me. Instead of having coffee with my mom, as we had planned, she just walked with me up and down Saint Clair Avenue for an hour, which was nice. Every now and then I would say something like, "Maybe this is how it starts?" and she would say, "This baby is coming!" and then I would put my hands on my back and walk some more. It was a sunny day, it was cold, I was hugely pregnant.

Over the next few days, things started to form. The back pain went from being vague—was that a twinge?—to very much present. My mom told me that contractions felt like her belly was being squeezed by a blood-pressure cuff, but my "rushes" (thanks, Ina May) settled in my back. Still, we were able to work through it. M put on David Bowie and we slow-danced to "Kooks," I read about art conservation in The New Yorker, and while it wasn't quite pleasant, it felt constructive. It was intimate. When a contraction hit, M would talk me through it—"Breathe, breathe, letitgoleitgoletitgo," and time them. My job was to just keep my head down and yes, breathe. It felt doable

Saturday night, we called the midwives, who came to our house and informed me that I was three centimetres dilated. This apparently was not quite large enough to pass the watermelon that was coming down the pipeline. Also, distressingly, my contractions, though increasingly painful, hadn't formed themselves into a rhythm yet. They were still five, six, seven minutes apart, coming haphazardly. They advised me to keep labouring at home, and they left at about 2:00 AM.

Sunday was...a blur, but I do know Sunday night was awful. It is almost literally impossible to describe this pain. I felt like I was being tased while I had the flu. I couldn't always stay upright; sometimes, I would sink to my hands and feet and moan, or shriek, or curse, or just pant like a dog. Sometimes, I would throw up. Sometimes, I would have to kneel on the bed and press mightily into the small of back, or along the tops of my hips, trying to relieve any kind of pressure that I could on that area. Sometimes, doing that was agony. My knees were bruised, my back felt swollen, and the "space between worlds" that one holistic birth site talked about felt like it was full of demons.

Monday morning, we went to the Midwives Collective office for a fetal non-stress test, where they monitor the baby's heartbeat for twenty minutes and see how my labour is progressing. Now, every position change triggered a new contraction. Sitting up, standing up, walking up stairs, sitting down, peeing, getting in and out of a car. I threw up cheerful little chunks of optimistic melon on Bloor Street walking to the midwives' office.  There, I found I was now six centimetres dilated—progress!—and despite not being in that five-minutes-apart rhythm, we could go the Toronto Birth Centre. There was a huge tub there; for weeks, I had wanted to labour in that. I was dreaming of that tub. That tub was going to solve some shit for me.

The Birth Centre is beautiful, but I don't really remember much about being there. I have flash-memories: sinking to my hands and knees as soon as I got into the birthing suite, hit by a blinding wall of pain; being petted gently by my husband and midwives as I screamed, labouring on my side in bed; my whole body shaking underwater as a contraction ripped through me in the tub and I wondered, briefly, if I would drown; just hating the birth stool (which the hippie part of me thought I would love!). My lips were chapped raw from breathing so hard. I threw up again. I made noises like a horse, a cat, a distressed and frightened animal. The tub wasn't the balm I had hoped for. Nothing was.

At three PM, after about five hours of labour, the midwives asked me if I wanted to keep labouring at the Birth Centre, or if I wanted to switch to Mount Sinai for another non-stress test and to start a pitocin drip to see if we could get the contractions more regular. I asked if I could have an epidural along with the pitocin; I cried when they said yes. My mom, who had appeared at some point, marched into traffic on Dundas Street and held her arms out like a warrior so we could pull out. I would have laughed if I could have.

At this point, I had been in early labour, or pre-labour, for nearly 80 hours. Here's how exhausted I was by then: I fell asleep during the epidural. For those of you who have never had an epidural, it involves shoving a long needle into your spine, and then a catheter the size of a pencil lead in along the same path. It is not exactly a back massage. And yet, by then, I was so ruined on pain that I barely felt it. The midwives were still with me, having switched from tee shirts and jeans to hospital gowns, but now I also had an anesthesiologist (two, actually, whom M described as "bro-y," and we agreed they were incredibly kind), and an OB, who wore pink-rimmed glasses and reminded me of my best gal Liz: competent, funny, and completely unwilling to fuck around when it came to health.

Now, finally, things were starting to happen, although not exactly in a way I might want. The baby's heart rate started to dip after every contraction; the OB discovered meconium in the amniotic fluid (meaning our little dude had taken his first momentous poop inside the womb), and now, instead of administering pitocin, we would all be heading to the OR for an emergency c-section.

I will pause here and say that, while I had visions of beautiful natural birth—himalayan rock-salt lamps! tub! birth stools! a sweaty, healthy glow!—I'm not an idiot. Birth isn't an emergency, and I would have preferred a natural experience, but the only outcome that I cared about was a healthy baby. The narrative around modern birth is, or can be, problematic and overmedicalized, but I am so happy that I live in a time where what happened to us wasn't a death sentence for our baby. It kept occurring to me that, one hundred years ago, it would have been. The thought makes me nauseous.

In any case, back to the OR. The whole thing would take about 40 minutes. They administered the numbing agent through epidural pathway, but this time, they wanted total coverage. M waited outside while they prepped me, and the midwives stepped to the side as the surgical team worked. I started to shake uncontrollably, and then my hands went numb (they use the same amount of numbing medication no matter how big the patient is, which meant that 5'1" me was frozen right up to my neck), and I could barely speak, my jaw was clenched so hard. When I told the anesthesiologist I felt fucked up, he helpfully told me that it was because my uterus was "outside my body and upside down," which, like, I am all for knowledge, but that was TMI.

In any case, the baby was born! The respiratory therapists aspirated all the poop-water from NS's lungs, M got to cut the cord, he introduced me to our son, I clenched and shook, and then somehow we were all in the recovery room with our parents, with everyone crying and laughing and me topless. (Everyone—and I mean everyone—related to this process has now seen some combination of my vagina and boobs.) When we introduced him to my parents, my dad started to cry—Noah Stanley is named in part after him—and everyone else started to cry.

And we were all happy. And we were all healthy! And we are now all home, after two days in the hospital, after lurching to the bathroom on unsteady feet, after kind nurses and lactation consultants and pediatricians, after learning how to swaddle our son, after M sleeping in a chair for two days, we are home, in bed, resting and sleeping and nursing and watching The X-Files in bed and trying to hang on for dear life as my post-partum hormones surge and pulse.

I won't tell you that it was easy. But I will tell you, without a doubt, with no hesitation whatsoever, that it was all worth it. This kid is great so far: warm, cute, a good sleeper, a healthy cry-er. He sleeps with one eye slitted slightly open, just like his papa, and looks terrific in hats, just like his mom. We are a family. We are all doing just fine.