I haven't written Kyle's birth story yet and it's safe to say that's probably never going to happen. I mean, the kid is going to be four (omg) in February, so I think that particular blogging ship has sailed. This is actually okay with me, though. It was such a perfect day, it's kind of nice to keep it all to myself. (I often say the nine months before and the two months after were hell but those two days in the hospital were pure perfection.)
One tiny little tidbit of a thing that came back to me tonight, though--as I was looking in the fridge in our garage and noticed a random bottle of cranberry juice that someone left at our house--was how we had free reign over the juice fridge in our hospital. I would send Mike down the hall once an hour, it felt like, on strict orders to fetch a giant cup of ice pellets and a couple containers of cranberry juice, so I could pour the latter over the former and chug it down. It had been years since I'd had cranberry juice, but it was just delicious after nine months of being sick, sick, sick. I don't know if there will ever be a good way to describe the awfulness that is puking at nine months pregnant from nausea AND heartburn. COMBINED!
That cranberry juice somehow made me feel normal after so many months of feeling the absolute opposite of normal. Feeling horrible, feeling awful, feeling humbled by how many public places I threw up in. I could enjoy eating and drinking things again! GIVE ME ALL THE CRANBERRY JUICE. (Also all the cupcakes and donuts. ALL OF THEM.)
It was so long ago, being pregnant, having Kyle, taking a newborn home, utterly confused and shocked and scared as to what to do with him. I know how to parent Kyle of October 2012 just fiiiiine. I question myself at times, sure, but most of the time I really don't. I'm his mom. A mom of an almost-four-year-old. We got this, you know.
Then I open our garage fridge and see a half-gallon of cranberry juice and catapult back to being in that hospital bed, holding my teeny-tiny boy, marveling at him--he was so much more beautiful than even my best pregnant moment could have dreamed him to be--and side-eyeing Mike into refilling the cranberry juice cup on my bedside table. Get me more delicious juice, babe, while I hold our delicious boy.
That's the thing about memory, you see, it's so far gone until it knocks us over flat with its presence. It's nothing until it's everything. It's a four-year-old boy kicking a soccer ball the wrong way down the field until it's a newborn with steel-blue eyes who looks at you like he's always known you (because he always has). Memory is dormant until it's all-encompassing. It's a planned blog post about (more) shoes until it's a blog post about how my tiny boy is now a soccer-ball chasing big boy.
He was the left and now he's the right.
It all came back in a cranberry-juice-soaked moment.