The Countdown by Alecia

                The countdown for having my own baby began for me when I was old enough to hold one.   No infant could move past me without my deer-in-headlights gaze, no toddler could escape my standard but effective stooge face.  Conversations often were put on hiatus while my puppy dog attention magnetized to the small nearby human begging for a smile.  Though I eventually grew out of my desire to birth ten kids simply for the sake of having children all around me, I still find that my best audiences are often children.  Perhaps that is why I am an elementary teacher. 

                I laugh now at my childhood plans for how life would unfold.  Married by 21, pregnant by 22, a house, a car and a job as an astronaut/botanist/pediatrician/etc. by the time I reached 23.  College slapped me in the face, however, and I awoke to find that my actual dreams had much more substance to them than the lifestyle many young girls dream about.  The world called to me, inviting me to live in unfamiliar places, take life-changing risks, and see my surroundings in new dimensions.  I learned to be an independent caretaker of myself, pushing the idea of motherhood way down the priority ladder, extending my countdown even further.  Of course I still took advantage of overwhelming any baby passing through my day, but I still had so many places to conquer, so many people to meet, so many ways to grow.

                Love slipped into my unsuspecting life one day at a Jamba Juice in Tucson.  Jason won me over so quickly that it took me off guard.  It turned out that the more I stopped trying to make my life into a romance movie, the more it became one.  Each new day of our six-month dating period spun our lives together in an intricate and mesmerizing tangle that I never needed to unwind.  Before I knew it, I was standing hand-in-hand in front of our Puget Sound alter, salty tears slipping into my toothy smile, marrying my best friend.  I now had a companion to share my baby countdown with, and I couldn’t have picked a better soul.

                Spending my days with the man of my dreams made me selfish for a while, however, and I savored every moment, every adventure, every touch between the two of us, just the two of us.  We could talk about our dreams without hesitation or embarrassment, and though we both were excited to produce a mini-Jalecia, we decided to accomplish some life goals first.  We bought a house, adopted a cat, canned fish for extra funds, explored Vietnam and Cambodia, trudged through a Master’s program, achieved National Board status, and enjoyed each other’s company along the way. 

                One Tuesday evening last June, I sat in the bathroom staring, not believing that the digital word read “pregnant” on the stick in front of me.  Had I known there had been any chance of this happening, I would have found a more creative way to present the news to my best friend upstairs, especially since he is so gifted in the art of romantic gestures.  But excitement and my childhood dream of being a mother left me sputtering the good news as I bounced on the bed next to him, the beginning of a night of no sleep but big dreams. 

The end of our countdown began to creep closer.  It was dotted with so many vivid and important memories: fruitless battles with nausea, tear-stained cheeks of future grandparents, a hasty extermination of caffeine and wine in my diet, my new favorite pair of maternity jeans, a new house to fit our new family, ultrasounds that clearly showed a penis, over-the-moon kisses from Daddy as we turned off the lights and snuggled close, and baby, baby, baby everywhere.  We inherited a garage full of kindness from mothers and fathers moving into new chapters of their child’s lives, and used it all to prepare our future son’s new room.  Dresser drawers overflowed with onesies that read “Tough Like Daddy” and “Bananas for Mommy.”  Toys and spoons and bottles and little socks and blankets and stuffed animals and books and miniature hats and more expanded our little house with happiness and love for the small person yet to come.  There was no better way to count down the days.

At midnight on February 15^th, the countdown spinners began to move at rapid speeds.  Mind-blowing contractions two minutes apart threw us out of our comfort zone and our warm bed and sent us out into the cold, clear night.  I tried to savor the quiet moments in the car between the volcano eruptions that started in my lower back, reassuring my worried husband that the pain only meant that we were one step closer to being parents.  I will never forget the look in his eyes that night, with a furrowed brow, wide lids, and concern illuminating the air around him.  He wanted nothing more than for me to feel no pain.  It was a look of pure love for his wife.  He was ready to move mountains for me, stop freeway traffic for me, carry me up the slopes of Mount Doom.  Sadly, none of this would have alleviated the mounting pain from my abdomen, but his look was enough to keep me strong enough through socializing with batty triage nurses, the painful ten minute process of finding my veins for the saline flow, the terrible urge to push our son through my seven centimeters of dilation, and the final administration of the epidural once we were safely moved to our new room.

As I settled into my numbness and our heart rates both fell to a reasonable count, we were able to enjoy the remainder of the baby countdown.  At 6:30 a.m. after a slight nap and some time to digest the early morning events, Dr. Heshmati ignited the final process in my delivery by breaking my water.  I began to push in increments of ten seconds, and I can remember so clearly the final countdown.  Ten… nine…eight, shouted the doc.  Seven… six… five…four, Jason shakily whispered into my ear.  Three… two… one, I screamed in my head as Elliott Morgan Aillaud escaped the darkness and came into view for the first time.  The countdown was finally over. 

                As he screamed his first breath, Jason clutched my hand tighter, and we cried together, knowing that this accomplishment meant that a whole new series of countdowns had just begun.  There will be short countdowns; 100 more rocks in the chair before I can move his curled up body to his bed, twenty more minutes until his soft, round belly needs to be satisfied, counting back from three as he decides not to make that really bad decision.  There will be longer countdowns; nine more months until he says his first word, two to three more agonizing years until he is trained to pee in the toilet, 16 years until he learns to drive a car.  And there will be more life-changing countdowns; eighteen years until I wipe away the tears as he drives away to college, waiting for the day he finds his best friend to marry, counting down the moment until I get to be a Grandma.  As Elliott was placed against my skin and Jason caressed both my face and our son’s soft back, I only felt happiness and love for the two boys in my life, and I looked forward to the next countdown.

Three O'Clock in the Morning

                Three o’clock in the morning is a time of day I used to have very little experience with. Sure, there was the summer at the salmon cannery when Alecia and I held the 10:00 PM to 2:00 PM shift and got to behold three in the morning in all its glory every day, but the monotony of that job made it different, just a blip on the shift-clock reminding us we still had eleven hours to go. There also, of course, were college parties that would occasionally keep me up to and sometimes past that hour, but 3:00 AM has never felt like this before. For the first time it feels truly important.

                Elliott Aillaud was born at 6:59 on the morning of February 15, 2013 at Providence Hospital in Everett. When the sun rose, it was a beautiful day, the kind that keep people living in rainy Western Washington and it brought with it feelings and emotions that can be explained endlessly, but never fully understood until they are experienced. We had brought into the world a new little human who will depend on us for love and support, nurture and care, and on that day the whole idea of giving him everything still didn’t seem like it would be enough.

                Seven weeks have passed and so many things that everyone says before the birth definitely come to fruition. There absolutely isn’t as much sleep as there was before. Parenting is, undoubtedly, exhausting. In fact, the entire day changed for me. I used to function pretty much from 6:00 AM to 11:00 PM and the hours in between were more or less a void. Now, I feel each of the 24 hours.

There are absolutely A LOT of diaper changes. We’re currently averaging about twenty a day and will occasionally get five-minute periods with three new diapers—or worse—a diaper change followed by swaddling, sitting down and rocking for twenty minutes calming Elliott to sleep and just about the time everything seems peaceful enough to go back to bed…the explosion.

Our lifestyle absolutely has changed. We haven’t been to a movie or to a show or to a sporting event. As a matter of fact, these days 8:30 feels pretty late and 9:00 seems like it’s well past bedtime. It’s unusual for us to make it through a one-hour TV show without interruption. Just watching two episodes of Game of Thrones was a week-long process. When we get Elliott down, it’s time for us to join him. There’s really no telling how many hours he’s going to give us, so we take it while he’s offering.

Those are some of the things people told us and I think, for the most part, we were ready for them, perhaps with the exception of the sheer magnitude of diapers. But there is so much more that I had no preparation for at all.

To meet the gaze of my son’s curious dark eyes already searching for meaning and discovery in his surroundings and feel the most powerful, boundless love, closeness, and attachment. There is a seemingly desperate need to keep him safe and make him happy and comfortable. The feeling of warmth and joy I get touching his soft skin and seeing his little smile or the excitement I feel when he tries to mimic facial expressions. Or simply the overwhelming feeling of looking at him sleeping, his huge butter cheeks, tousled red hair, tiny chest rhythmically rising and falling as tears begin to well in my eyes knowing we brought such a beautiful little person into the world. There is nothing that quite prepared me for all of that.

It’s at three o’clock in the morning every day when it all hits home. After the diaper change. After the feeding. When rain or wind is the only sound and I’m rocking Elliott slowly back to sleep my eyes heavy, feeling his breath on my skin, his head in my hand, that’s when I feel my heart, my soul, and the entire world all wrapped up in this tiny human being. Despite the exhaustion, the diapers, and the early bedtimes three o’clock in the morning has never held so much meaning or so much love.