On Mabel and Christmas Time.

Christmas is here. I know this because I have been singing Run With The Fox incessantly and occasionally spontaneously combusting into unruly peals of the descant parts of Hark the Herald Angels in inappropriate public situations and in dangerously high keys. I'll know it's Christmas eve when I am possessed by the the spirit of Angela Lansbury and Start shouting the Mame soundtrack out of the Car window in a bid to share my festive ardour with unsuspecting, not cheery enough looking and frankly undeserving passers by. This is my default yule behaviour. I have always been a bit nuts with the spirit of Christmas.

This year, although the loophole in my musical taste remains the same everything else is different. This will be my first Christmas as a parent. My first time making a stocking and biting off a reindeer tooth shaped section of a carrot and a mince pie and I could not be more thrilled. I have long wanted to write about the child with whom I will share all this but I have been a bit too involved with the daily business of growing her to get sufficient perspective on her startling arrival to share it in written down words. But this just seems like the right time, the closing of a year and a time when traditionally, in my family at least, we all review the year we have had and decide what to be grateful for, how to improve our lives next year and generally re group with the people we love to revel in how much we love each other.

I want to precede this with a bit of a disclaimer. I have spent alot of time this year listening to 'Birth Stories' and am consequently totally immune to the gore involved. I also didn't want to write an NCT magazine style account of my child's arrival, I hate that. I do however want to get it out there a bit - An abridged, It'll be Alright on the night style birth story. Placenta and guts and no boring bits about breathing or how much I love my midwife. One that when people ask me as they continue to do daily about the details, the good bits, I can e-mail them a weblink. Not that I don't like talking about it, I do, every girl wears her birth like a badge of honour, but it's true that you forget the finer and often funnier details and I'd like my Baby to read about it the way I remember it one day.

It all started to go wrong at 20 weeks. Halfway to term. I had been having the easiest pregnancy, I was fit and healthy and hungrier than I ever imagined possible for a human. We went for the 20 week scan and were told that our baby was unusually small and had an echogenic bowel (speckled and bright on the ultra sound) . We were also told that it was a SHE and after 20 weeks of calling her Arthur, we re named her Mabel. We were told that the bowel thing was a marker for a few potential conditions Cystic Fibrosis, Parvo Virus and Downs Syndrome being the top three. We underwent tests, blood and wee mainly and after a gruelling 11 day wait we were told that we were free of Parvo and clear for genetic CF. I had opted out of the Downs screening at 12 weeks but was reassured that Mabel's femurs were in proportion to her torso and so that ought to make me feel better. Jim, my Husband and Baby Father (I believe this is the modern term) and I convinced ourselves to keep calm and carry on, what else could we do? We were advised to come back for monthly scans. We did. 24 weeks - Heart? Hearty. Brain? Brainy. Legs? Leggy. Growing? A little bit. Smashing. I was feeling more confident by this time and still jolly well although my ankles were long gone and in hindsight I see that I looked like a waterlogged corpse. "Onward" said I "And bring me more cream cakes to fatten this foetus". The 28 week scan arrived. Friday April 3rd. I remember saying to Jim in the car "everything is fine.... I know it, you'll see." But it was like this - Heart? Hearty. Brain? Brainy. Legs? Skinny. Growing? Um....Shrinking. Losing weight. Wasting. Our Baby was shrinking!! A man, A consultant came and scratched his head and some utterances were made about sending me to a clinic in Southampton 60 miles from home in Dorchester but I protested that I couldn't possibly get home to walk the dog before supper from there. My lady consultant was sent for. She came. She looked blinkingly at the scan and told me that I would need to be admitted for monitoring. I protested some more about my undone laundry and not having had breakfast. They brought me toast with Marmite and tea and asked me to prepare myself for the gravity of what they were about to tell me. I took a bite of toast and a breath. "Amity, I think it is very likely that your Baby will need to be born within the next week, you have no diastolic flow to your placenta and your baby is really struggling" Gulp. This was the beginning of the early Mabelisation of our year.

I was admitted immediately and alot of tests ensued, my favourite of which involved piddling into a jug and collecting all my wee in a giant bottle for 24 hours. Hospital is boring and so a project is a project. It transpired over a period of days that I had fast advancing Pre Eclampsia (look it up) which was restricting Mabel's growth and increasingly limiting her chances and mine of a safe delivery by the hour. They gave me two agonizing bum jabs of steroids to help her lungs mature faster and prepared me for a delivery at a time which would be specified by when I looked like I might be becoming unmanageably ill. And we just waited for that to happen. Which it did at about 9am on Monday April 6th. My consultant peered at me a bit more and the C Section team swung magically into action. And what a team! There were eighteen people present at Mabel's birth aside from me and her her Daddy and looking back, I knew who they all were. During my weekend of waiting they had all visited me and explained their role in Mabels' safe crossover and I had just about registered them each through the high blood pressure haze and drugs. The moment of delivery was alarmingly clear however. I had asked for no music to be played and for there to be silence as far as possible. I was worried I would not be able to concentrate on hearing my baby. Even so the mood was light and as I lay on the table with a full spinal block and with Jim at my side behind the screen, a nurse told me she had just catheterised me and was now sterilizing 'the area' it occurred to me that I could neither see nor feel my body but that it must be naked and 18 strangers were examining me. I confirmed with the anesthetist that this was the case and was beside myself with laughter when the knife went in. Mabel was delivered 9 minutes later and was born peering wildly around the theatre breathing and soon after - shouting. I was glad of the radio free room as I was able quickly to hear her tiny but determined little voice and that made all the difference to the way the next few hours felt for me.

They showed her to us, she was wearing a white knitted woolen egg cosy on her head and had her cheeks indignantly sucked in with her eyes wide and her nose shrivelled. She was weird looking, not like anyone in either of our families I thought. She looked like Montgommery Burns but she looked directly at me and I absolutely recognised her in the way women do with their own offspring and in a primal way you never believe is possible until it happens to you. They had wrapped her in Bubble wrap. She was taken to the Special Baby unit for work and we were told that she weighed 1lb 8oz but was breathing independently. I wondered for a fleeting moment how on earth I would shift the other 20lb I had gained during my 29 week pregnancy and how long it would be before someone would bring me some tea and then the post op Morphine kicked in and I was mush for several days.

I only vaguely remember the next time I saw Mabel. It was 6pm the day of her delivery and I had been trying hard to convince the midwives that i was compus mentus enough to be taken to my baby, I had to be able to stand up alone, Another Project. Eventually I dragged myself into a chair and was pushed by my frazzled Husband, drip, catheter bag and full blown morphine rant to the NICU. I must mention here that Jim had bravely and unfalteringly been by Mabel's side all afternoon, holding her hand while they worked on her, reading her the sports pages of the Papers and generally being a top Dad but I digress. There she was in an incubator, all tiny and screwed up but 696 grammes of pink thin skinned perfection, breathing by herself and all mine. I looked at her for about 10 seconds before I vomited up the contents of my stomach - specifically 2 cans of Appletizer which I had demanded like and addict in recovery that my Dad fetch for me from a vending machine and I was swiftly whisked back to my bed for more morphine and rest.



Mabel rallied. She was very very tiny. I cried alot, some people visited. I called distant relatives on my mobile in the middle of the night while doped out of my head on prescription sedatives and more morphine and was shouted at by a barky irish midwife for not going to sleep after lights out. More crying. Sometime on Day 2 and with excellent guidance, I found the energy to milk myself into a syringe for Mabel's first meal and later that same day I was given a double nozzled hospital grade breast pump to further my commitment, damn I was good at pumping, and a dedicated 11 week vigil of milk making was begun. On Day 4, Good Friday, I went home with my breast pump but without my Baby. My mum made spaghetti bolognese and salad and my Brother visited. There was jocular conversation and there was some attempt at celebration involving champagne and neighbours visiting and cards and flowers arrived but everything washed over me and Jim and I had no idea then if or how we would all survive or how the world was still turning.

Mabel was in an incubator for 61 days. I could write about the hours at her bedside, the nights calling the hospital every hour to check she was still breathing, the hysteria in the car because we were late for a twice daily nappy change, the 7 days in a high intensity unit away from home or the endless canulisation, long lines to her heart administering dextrose and lipids when her digestive system packed up, or the nasal gastric tubing and blood transfusions that got her through it all. I could write about the hours of TV I watched in the middle of the night while I expressed milk on a 4 hourly routine for the duration of her hospital time while she grew slowly but eventually surely. And I could regale you with anecdotes of learning to feed a baby with a lemon sized head from a watermelon sized boob. But we would be here forever. The point is, having a premature baby is an horrendous roller coaster and I could never convey the darkness of the lowest moments or the all consuming rapture brought on by a weight gain of a single ounce. But it occurs more frequently and in far more families than I knew before it was me in the hot seat and moreover, it is survivable and Mabel ad James and I have survived it together.

After 61 days in intensive care, Mabel was moved into a nursery for the last 2 weeks of her hospital time. She thrived and entertained everyone on the staff with her super human might and other worldly noises. Mostly she loved being fed and sung to and between tube and boob feeds, I made up for for the delivery room silence by thrashing my guitar at her in her cot in a folk punk style and soon enough she grew big and came home. It was June the 20th, two days before her due date, the sun shone and it was fete day in our village. Mabel was 4lb 6oz that day and we took her to the fete mainly because after all the waiting we realised that we hadn't made any plans beyond this big coming home moment and so it seemed like the only sensible thing to do. We ate hot dogs and watched clog dancers and a tug of war while holding hands and time stood still. Everything was finally perfect.

Mabel is an amazing baby, a real little wonder. Her hands and feet are scarred from the pins and needles but she has endured it all like a zen warrior endures a spiritual battle and apart from that and her still diminutive stature, one would never know the journey she has taken to get here. She is almost 9 months old and weighs 11lb 11oz and she loves the Christmas tree lights and the ginger biscuits I have been defiantly allowing her to feed herself against general health advice. She genuinely seems to find me funny too which is a relief, and so far she has been enthralled by the renditions of O Come All Ye faithful at bath time. I am so looking forward to helping her open her Fisher Price Retro re-issue chatter phone and reading Miffy in the Snow to her this Christmas. I have taken great care to select the crackliest paper I can find because she loves paper and we shall now go about the normal new family business of making some fresh family traditions together. Today, on the way to give a demonstration of breast feeding to an ante natal group, I raucously sang ' I need a little Christmas ' from Mame with the car windows wide open and Mabel in her baby car seat next to me shrieking with laughter and almost in tune while snow fell on our beautiful corner of West Dorset and I realise that in spite all the tribulations of these past months, the tears and tantrums and the resulting decline of our careers and re-assessment of all our needs and desires not to mention all the hurdles we may well face together in the coming years. I am thrilled to be just here, in this place and in this moment, to be me and more to be Mabel's Mummy. There isn't enough crackly wrapping paper in the known universe for a present of this size and I'm not talking about the Fisher Price Chatter phone.