#Reverb10 - Sat. 12/4/10 - Wonder

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michelle Medina <michellem86@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2010 17:23:03 -0500
Subject: #Reverb10 - Sat. 12/4/10 - Wonder
To: michellem86 <michellem86@gmail.com>

December 4 – Wonder.
How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

I stumbled upon it quite by accident late Wednesday night, or early
Thursday morning, depending on how you look at it! Lol. It was 5AM & I
had been up all night posting discussions to the Pink Posse Community.
My main concern was creating a 12 Days of Christmas book for my Father
who's going through some difficulty at the moment, but I was digging
up all my inspirational stories from a newsletter & so was also
passing them along to the PP Community.
Anyway, I happened to turn the TV on for a minor break and flipped it
to NatGeo as there was nothing else on but infomercials & "MASH",
which I do love, but wasn't particularly drawn to that morning. Now,
for both those of you who do & don't know me, you either know only my
partial birth story or nothing of it at all. This is important, trust
me. On NatGeo they were showing a woman going through her 9 months of
pregnancy. These shows usually highlight the work of the woman, the
challenges/difficulties she encounters, they will also focus on her
happiness & the like. However, point is, it's always about her & the
work she does, not about the work the baby does or the miracle of
what's going on inside her womb.
First up, my birth story, taken from Part III of my "Dear Baby
Michelle" blog post which is posted at the Pink Posse Community blog
if anyone feels like reading it:
"The birth story, the one you've been told, goes something like this:
K went into labor Sunday night at around 7PM *she'd been on bedrest
for about 3 months*, sent Dad off to work Monday morning & then he
showed up at the hospital at some point. He was a great birthing coach
& on Tuesday morning, January 14th, 1986, after hours of labor, the
bands holding you back snapped, Doctor Whiting had the forceps on your
head & between the bands & the forceps & the pushing, you flew into
the world! Doctor T, who was standing behind Doctor Whiting caught
you, they cleaned you up & didn't place you on K's stomach as they'd
promised. She started asking what was going on & before they whisked
you away, they turned you around & let her & Dad see you. She was numb
with shock & Daddy put his head on her shoulder & 'howled like a
wounded animal.' *her exact words*. They took her in, sewed her up &
in the meantime she kept asking for you. They finally got annoyed &
stuck her in a room with low lighting & gave her some valium. She
still kept asking for you & Dad went in to let her know he was going
to get a shower & change & would be back. She thought he was leaving
her. She called a couple people, the grandmother rushed right over,
but her best friend S initially thought she was joking when she told
her about you. When she realized K wasn't joking, she dropped what she
was doing & came out. Dad came back showered, with a dozen roses & a
card that simply read: 'Thank you for my beautiful baby girl.'
They did finally let K see you, in the glass islet, & eventually let
her hold you. You 'wouldn't shut up, but as soon as I handed you to
your father, you shut right up! I should have known then. . .' again,
her exact words. Then they had to move you from Saginaw General
Hospital to Motts Children's Hospital 2 hours south in Ann Arbor. The
notorious money scam comes up next, as the grandmother & the rest of
the assembled masses didn't have enough money to get you transported,
so the grandmother wrote a bounced check for $200 to get you into the
ambulance. She said you had the cutest nose & Aunt KD called you her
little M&M. Once you were transported, you refused to eat so they gave
you a feeding tube. You met your plastic surgeon Doc A 6 hours after
you were born & stuck with him even after he moved to North Carolina.
Anyway, that all happened on Tuesday. K couldn't travel, so she called
the hospital everyday until Saturday telling them to give you hugs &
kisses for her & tell you that she loved you. When she & Dad got home,
she instructed him to remove the playpen & any reminders of the fact
that you weren't with her. She used to cry about how she'd be a great
mother if only she were given the chance, & now it had come to this.
She was angry that other mothers got to take their children home right
away & she had to leave you there. Then they were finally able to get
there to see you on Saturday & you yanked out your feeding tube
immediately! The nurse put it back in, but you pulled it out. She put
it in again & you pulled it out again & she decided you were trying to
tell them something. It took them a while, but they managed to get you
drinking from a bottle, just a special bottle. K always followed this
up with the happy disclaimer that you were wanted & that if they'd
told her she could take home any baby in the nursery, she'd have
picked you up & walked out with you.
That's the birth story, from her perspective. Dad doesn't talk about
it much other then to say he doesn't remember howling but that doesn't
mean he didn't, he loved you & was angry like K, that you would be
blind & have to go through life struggling. K also said she was afraid
that you were in the dark & it took Doc A telling her you couldn't
possibly be afraid of the dark like she'd been as a little girl
because you didn't know what the dark even was.
Again, this is part of my healing to, & to be perfectly honest with
you, this hurts me to. It's hard for me to put into words the feelings
that have come up sharing this with you. I'm angry! Enraged really, &
my heart is broken! Shattered into a billion pieces, bleeding &
spurting & pulsating. It feels like I've raked us both over shards of
glass, jagged cold pieces cutting into our flesh & branding us with a
searing throbbing pain that won't stop! For that I am sorry. . . But I
need you to know there are two choices you can make now. Really, two
choices we can make. We can choose to remember the best part of our
birth, or we can choose to remember the worst parts. I can't think of
a clearer way to illustrate that life IS NOT fair! However, it's what
we do with the unfairness of it that determines how we'll come out the
other side. You missed necessary bonding with K. You lacked the love &
comfort of your family for 4 days & were robbed of endless baby
moments in those first few days. After your birth, Doctor Whiting
actually quit delivering babies because he blamed himself for how you
were born. You in turn, felt guilty that he felt guilty, that K &
Daddy felt guilty. All that is true & I stand with you in your pain,
your sense of being wronged & cheated! I stand with you in your anger
& rage! Now that we've stood in it though, it's time to release it. It
won't be easy, but then again, as the cliched saying goes, nothing
worth having *or doing in this case*, is worth having or doing without
the heartache behind it."
So now you know the story, here's the sense of wonder! I watched the
entire last hour of the show. It's a 2 hour program & I had seen the
first part before, I just never made it through the whole thing. Why
I'm not sure, though my desperate need to avoid anything birth related
probably played into it on a major scale. The show not only covered
the mother though, they even recreated how the mother sounds to the
baby while she's in the womb. They said that a baby will hear her
mother much more clearly then she'll hear her Father or anyone else,
because she's so close to her. They said that when your listening to
music the baby can pick up on low frequency noises but she'll block
the louder ones. She can be startled & if the music is soft it will
relax her. If it is loud and hard it'll get her kicking and even
jumping! They talked about how her brain develops, how her body forms
and her lungs come into being. They talked about everything, not only
recreating the sound in the womb *things sound muffled in there, &
made me think of being underwater*, they also let you hear her
heartbeat & had 4-D scans on the TV. It didn't matter that I couldn't
see them, by the time the mother gave birth to her baby girl, I was
bawling! I've watched TLC or Discovery Health before, watched "A Baby
Story" & the like & would speciffically watch the birthing parts for
the technical aspects of it. Was she screaming in agony or doing her
best to be quiet? Did she give birth in a hospital or at home? So I
watched for technical stuff & felt nothing, not even when I heard the
baby cry. Or rather, not nothing, but a hollow sense of emptiness.
Birth is supposed to be magical & wonderful & I couldn't find the
magic or the wonder in it. I couldn't find anything in it! It was
frustrating because I love babies, in fact, their my favorite size &
type of human-being! Lol. Their cute & cuddly & bouncy! The simplest
pleasures make them happy & they completely trust you to take care of
them instead of wondering if as a blind person, or a facially
disfigured person or *fill in your own blank here* person, if you can
take care of them. They just readily trust you to do so. Yes they cry
& poo & squirt pee at you if you aren't careful enough to make sure
their done before you take their diaper off! Lol. Yes they shake their
heads & won't always let you feed them, they burp & spit up all over
you & create enough mucus to make your own mucus ocean, but their
adorable! Absolutely, positively, perfectly adorable! Their to young
to care about what they look like or what you look like. They'll play
with anyone & believe they can do anything! Everything is new & bright
& their filled with endless amounts of curiosity, love, energy &
wonder. Everything is just as it should be to them. They haven't had
time to get all apathetic & start feeling hopeless about the bills
piling up or the miserable economy or the awful news reports. They
just are, from moment to moment & they love to just be from moment to
moment!
So to sit here & try & describe what I felt as I watched the mother
give birth & heard her baby girl cry is nearly impossible other then
to say that I finally felt it! Wonder, awe, astonishment, the
magicalness of it! I FINALLY felt it & it wasn't even my baby!
I find it quite fitting that I'm ending this year on a note like
this. I actually had to look up the definition of wonder, because I
knew it was more then gazing in wonder at a hot rockstar, or
alternately wondering how exactly God got his voice to sound like
that! Lol. & it turns out I was right! This is wonder! Real, true,
incredible wonder! A wonder on an epic scale! While those things I
mentioned are wonderful, there is nothing as wonderful & awe-inspiring
as the birth of a baby!


--
"Something in the way. . .
Hmmm. . .
Something in the way. . .
Hmmmm. . ."
--Kurt Cobain "Something In The Way"
"Pain? You don't know what pain is!!"--Author Unknown