Page 28 of How We Loved

Mine.

And Ben’s.

But mainly mine because I did all the hard work.

The midwife was asking Ben to do something, but I didn’t care. I was staring at her. And I never planned to stop. A few checks, and she was placed on my chest where I just stared, almost numb with exhaustion but flooded with such a deep and territorial sensation inside of me that it could have ripped me apart. Which is what she basically did to my bits and pieces.

Then the midwife, Mary her name was, said the one thing I didn’t want to hear. “You need to push...” for a moment I thought she was going to say twin out. But no, thank God there really was only one, “the placenta.”

I stared at her blankly, almost asleep and dreamlike. “The what now?”

“The placenta. It has to come out, it can’t stay in there.”

Ben was stroking my head. “You can do it, Lilah, you can do this.”

I don’t know how I did it, but I did. Mary caught the placenta and then took it away, and I didn’t have the energy to ask what she was doing with it. Launching it out the window for all I cared.

Then I was totally done. Tristan came and kissed my forehead. “Proud of you, sis,” he said, and for once he sounded like he meant it. Mer and Mum peered at the baby cooing, then they all went back downstairs, leaving me and Ben with our baby.

I looked up to find tears trickling down Ben’s face, which set off a chain reaction of my own. “She’s so beautiful.” He kissed me. “Thank you.”

Mary did a few more checks and explained some stuff to us that I wasn’t listening to at all. Shame I wasn’t listening because I would have known then that she was about to start sewing me back together.

“What shall we call her?” I whispered to Ben.

“Perfect.”

“I think she might get bullied at school.”

Ben crinkled a smile at me. “I love you, Lilah McCannon.”

“I love you.”

Then we both just sat and stared until our family joined us again, and then Beth and Jayne popped in.

Here we all were, in year three of our university degrees, and I’d just had a baby. A real baby.

Like a real one.

This is going to be perfect. I can feel it now.

29th November

Two things:

1) My nipples are on fire. They look like spicy pepperoni and according to the baby, don’t taste anywhere near as good.

2) The baby still doesn’t have a name.

“Isla?” Ben suggested. The baby with no name, my precious little scrumptious ball of nipple-killing heaven, was lying on his chest asleep. To be honest, I wanted to lie on his chest and sleep. I’d been up every two hours trying to get the baby with no name to feed—not easy. By the time we were having our conversation about names, I was feeling a little edgy.

“Hi, this is my wife Lilah, and my daughter, Isla.”

“Fair point,” he agreed, but I think mainly because he was worried I was going to cry, again. “Sweetheart, you’re exhausted, why don’t I take her for a little while and you can sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep. I want to be with you.”

Ben laughed and rocked gently against me. “Fine, I’ll stay. But I’ve got a numb arse; let’s try and put her down.”