May 26, 2023

Just You Wait…

14 years ago this morning, my daughter was born, but I want to back up about 120 minutes before that when I was being prepped for a cesarean and a nurse was putting an IV into my arm. It was only us two in the room, and she asked me why I was having a scheduled c-section. I explained that our baby was transverse, lying on her side across the womb, instead of in the head-down position that would facilitate actually being born, and was absolutely unbudgeable.

And I still can’t believe that the next part really happened, with me so completely vulnerable and on the cusp of a life-changing experience, and in my mind that nurse was chain smoking as she said this, though that part really isn’t true. And what she told me was, “Kids—if they don’t screw you one way, they’ll find another.”

I said to her, “It’s all worth it though, right?”

And I absolutely swear that she answered, “No.”

*

I thought about that nurse a lot in the days and nights (especially the nights) to follow, as my life was swept up in a hurricane that would last for weeks and weeks. Only in the last couple of years, I’ve realized that I was suffering from postpartum depression through all that (and I was actually the last person on the planet to figure this out; when I confessed my realization to my husband, he rolled his eyes and said, “Um, yeah, we know.”).

The nurse with her IV, a malevolent force, somebody who haunted me, like the bad fairy who turns up at Sleeping Beauty’s christening with her own curse via a very sharp needle. (It was Emily Urquhart’s Ordinary Wonder Tales that made me think of her in this way—such a wonderful book!).

*

“Just you wait” was a line I heard a lot in those terrible early unsteady, ever-shifting early days of motherhood.

In another story that I really can’t believe actually happened (memory is mutable, especially when one is a storyteller; who knows?) I was pushing my stroller down the street when a car slowed down and somebody screamed out the window, “Just wait ’til they’re a teenager!”

*

Just wait…

Those words were always ominous, and I’d also be told to savour my child’s babyhood, a time during which I was often miserable, and usually unfulfilled. It was not the best of times. Caring for babies is demanding, unceasing, exhausting, debilitating, isolating, and generally unsupported by society at large, and worst of all, babies don’t talk.

But, thankfully, babies grow up.

Just wait…

*

“Just wait,” I tell parents now, those who are overwhelmed by the labour of it all, deep in the thick of it. “Because those days are going to go by so fast (hooray!) and one day you’re going to find yourself the parent of a 14-year-old, truly one of the most interesting, hilarious people you’ve ever met in your life. And she’s going to teach you things, and make you think, and she’s going to be taller than you when she has her shoes on and you don’t, so that when she puts her arms around you and you’re enveloped in her hug, you’re going to think, ‘Who is this amazing person and how did we get here?’

She’s going to love reading, and learning, and have very specific ideas about what channel the car radio should be tuned to, and she’ll have strong feelings about politics and JK Rowling (thumbs down, which is fine, because you never managed to get past Harry Potter Book Three), and have her bookshelves organized by genre (romance and murder mystery, obviously, as if there are other genres), and be obsessed with make up, and want to do your eyeliner, and have the best hair you’ve ever seen, and be heading to high school in the fall, and who has consented to have you play the “host” role at her Bridgerton-themed mystery birthday party tonight, which means you must not be too mortifying (yet) and you haven’t even promised not to speak out of turn (but you won’t, because this is a super important gig, the job of a lifetime, and you really want to get it right.)

Just you wait…