19 on the 19th

Today is Tom's 19th birthday. He was training at the crack of dawn, but I managed to meet him at 1pm for a birthday lunch and present exchange before I began the 6 hour drive home..... thank goodness for the new car and cruise control.

Now I think about it, the drive home was about as long as I was in labour, and whilst it was a bit uncomfortable, probably a preferable way to spend 6 hours, especially as I got to listen to radio 4 and eat jelly babies, whilst testing my new voice controlled car phone facility and chat with Beewriter en route. 

So 19 years ago, I was still married to Andrea and he had just started teaching at Oxford Brookes. In fact he was due to do his first lecture that day. I had been up since 5am with aches and wondering if it was the start of labour. I woke him up at 8 and told him - 'No!!' he said 'my first lecture's today....'. 

He hadn't been sure about being there for the birth anyway and my friend Heather had agreed to be my birth partner. He went off to the Uni and Heather appeared to help with Josh who was 21 months old.

My next door neighbour then managed to set fire to her kitchen, not seriously but resulting in a lot of smoke, and appeared looking for sanctuary with her young children, and my friend Lucia popped over with her daughter just as the midwife and her student midwife appeared. It was quite a party.

I can remember quite distinctly the first big contraction as I knelt on the living room floor. We had a flood cellar below and just bare floorboards. Mid-contraction I saw the light from the cellar between the floor broads and remember thinking 'we must turn that light off!'.

Just as we decided to hit the hospital, Andrea appeared having decided he did want to be there for the birth after all. Poor Heather ended up staying at home with Josh who, unknown to me, vomited all over her soon after we left.

I managed to get the birthing pool at the JR, and my GP was there too. Heather found a neighbour to look after Josh and arrived just before Tom was born. She was the first to hold him in fact, and helped me to shower afterwards. My GP asked me if I needed anything - pizza! was my reply. He managed to muster up some toast. 

Josh was born at home so I was unfamiliar with the hospital system but eventually ended up on a ward for an overnight stay which was horrible compared to being at home. Andrea popped in again later with a bottle of Baileys (maybe that's what they do in Italy???) I had a big swig anyway. The ward was full of babies crying and people coming in and out all night so impossible to sleep, the bathrooms were filthy and no one came to see me for 12 hours, by which time I was packing up ready to go home. 

Yes, come to think of it, despite traffic jams and an unplanned satnav diversion through a series of dark country lanes outside Oxford (one of those moments when you hope your satnav does know a sneaky route round a road closure and is not going to direct you into a river), my journey back from Newcastle was distinctly less dramatic than that other kind of hormone-drenched life-changing amazing journey 19 years earlier. And I got this lovely boy out of it too :-)