What has surprised me most in these first six months is that there have been more things that I didn’t expect than things I did.

Here are a few of them…

She’d be grumpy for about 6 weeks.

“She hates being alive,” I said on more than one occasion in those first weeks. “She’s not enjoying her life at all.” I expected her to look and act like a baby. Babies are cute, smiley, playful things. Newborns are not babies – they’re little alien-like creatures with no neck and the posture of an old man. Their hands rarely open from little fists, seemingly ready to lay one on you at any moment. There’s no smiling, no laughing, no warmth. You look at them and think I love you more than anything in the world. You’re everything to me. I’d move mountains for you. I’d cross oceans for you, and they just stare blankly at the wall. Spew on your face. Scream at you for food. Majorly pissed off to be in the world. “Should we send her back? She hates it here.”

But then that first smile appears and it’s like pure sunshine.

How physical it is after the birth.

All you hear about is how physical the labour is. What you don’t think about is now you have a real life human who needs you to do absolutely everything for them – the rocking, the holding, the feeding. It’s a full body workout every single day.

The toe licking.

Ummmm. No one warned me this was a thing?? Her circus-level flexibility is astounding. Full toes are plunged into the mouth and sucked on like lollipops. Who needs teethers?

The constant creeping around while she sleeps.

I know, I know, you’re not “meant” to do this, but we live in a single-level house with creaky floorboards and the few times we’ve tried to be normal, she’s woken up. Soooo… creeping around it is. It’s a sight to behold, really – my husband and I leaping over known floorboard-offenders like nimble ninjas, silently preparing meals, whispering to each other or sending texts from room to room, eating most meals outside on our deck so we might, just for a few minutes, actually speak like normal human beings. Oh yes, it’s a barrel of fun, our house. You should come over some time – but don’t flush the toilet, don’t use the taps, don’t excite the dog, don’t drop anything, don’t laugh, don’t cough. In fact, don’t even breathe, ok? Cool.

Re-visiting picture books from my own childhood.

It wasn’t long before the “A is for Apple”- type baby books bored me to tears, so out came the picture books with actual stories. The simpler books will have their day once she starts reading for herself and recognising words, but for now it’s mostly about her hearing language. It’s surprised both Darcy and I how much we’ve enjoyed re-visiting some old classics we hadn’t set eyes on in about 25 years – Hairy Maclary, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Are We There Yet, Uno’s Garden, Belinda the Cow (a true masterpiece – I’d forgotten about my friends Bessie and Old Tom!), Bad Jelly the Witch (gloriously unhinged), Fancy Nancy and all the Shirley Barbers. With two trained actors for parents, well, the girl has no choice but to listen to a daily array of silly voices and impassioned readings.

The Bluey soundtrack.

We have not yet watched a single episode of Bluey. I hear it’s life-changing stuff. But that soundtrack, my goodness. It’s pure joy.

Feeling closer to the other women in my life.

Not only the women in my friends and family, but random strangers on the street. As you pass by each other, pushing your pram or carrying your bub, there’s an unsaid connection. A silent knowing. All it takes is a smile, a nod, a friendly glance and it conveys so much – I see you. I get it. You’re doing great. It’s a beautiful secret society I was oblivious to before.

Her bodily fluids don’t bother me in the slightest.

I expected it all to be more, well, gross. It’s not. When it’s your own child, the array of things coming out of every part of her really don’t bother you at all. When she’s come from inside your literal body, it all just feels like your own. And a note on the poops – no one told me they look like mustard and smell like yoghurt (for now at least – we have just entered the wonderful world of solids!)

I care less about how I look.

She doesn’t know about beauty standards yet. She doesn’t care that my hair is in the world’s messiest bun every morning when I go in to pick her up out of her cot. When she grins up at me, I grin right back at her without caring about the lines that form around my eyes as I do. I make silly faces when we’re playing, I dance around the living room like a weirdo just to make her laugh. It’s completely freeing. She just sees me, her mum, with zero judgement. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could feel this free with everyone in our lives? To see right to the core of each other, instead of constantly focussing so much on our appearances?

Breastfeeding: the most unexpected love story of all.

“But I don’t want to feel like a cow”, was what I retorted every time my mum talked about breastfeeding.

“It’s the most wonderful thing”, she’d say in that wistful, sing-song voice laden with nostalgic memories of feeding her own three babies. “When they’re suckling away, it’s just the most amazing feeling. There’s nothing like it, darling”.

With the freedom of a twenty-something with time on her side, I’d roll my eyes, “yeah, yeah, OK Mum. Whatever.”

Throughout my pregnancy, it was the thing I was least keen for – the breastfeeding. I knew I’d give it a go, and if I could do it, great. If I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to be too hard on myself. But honestly, the thought of it completely weirded me out.

So it’s been the biggest surprise of my life to find how much I love breastfeeding. I’ve been lucky – from that first moment, she latched perfectly and we’ve had a dreamy journey ever since. Mum, as usual, was right. It is the most amazing feeling. Something I never could have anticipated. The hormonal rush of oxytocin that floods through me each time she feeds blows my mind. It’s still just as strong now, six months in. The fact that I can keep her alive with just my own body, fuelling her with all the nutrients she needs, is astonishing to me.

There are so many things wrapped up in the breastfeeding journey I couldn’t have expected: the extreme hunger and thirst it brings, not caring at all about being seen doing it in public, how skilled I would get at eating/typing/drinking with one hand, the beautiful sounds she makes, our quiet moments together, the intimacy of it, how it forces me to slow down, how it grounds me in moments of frustration or overthinking or panic. I don’t think there’s a better or more fulfilling feeling than when she’s drinking, pauses to look up and smile at me for a few seconds, then goes back to it.

To my own (and Mum’s) greatest surprise, it’s been one of my proudest achievements in life, feeding this little baby.

Most used phrase #1: “Awake Windows.”

A year ago I’d never spoken the words “awake” and “window” in the same sentence. If you’d said it to me, I probably would have replied with are you for real? Doesn’t the baby just go to sleep when they’re tired?

Hahahahahaha.

I didn’t realise there was some Goldilocks-level science to getting it juuust right… make sure they’re not too tired, but make sure they’re tired enough. We now say, without irony, “sorry we can’t go to that café on the other side of town because it won’t fit into her awake window.” And “this awake window has gone on way too long.” And “which awake window should we go out to the shops in today?” Cringe city, I know.

Most used phrase #2: “Check the TOG guide.”

Similarly, not too long ago I remember saying to a friend “what on Earth is a tog? Don’t they just go in pyjamas?” She smiled patiently, knowing one day I’d understand. If we thought the awake windows had some crazy science to them, the Thermal Overall Grade is some next-level-Einstein-s**t. “What TOG are we dressing her in tonight?” has become a nightly catch phrase in our house, as we try to figure out the exact right clothing layer to match the exact right sleeping bag layer to match the ever-changing temperature. Our nightly conversations are no longer about our day, or the state of the world, or what TV show we’re watching, but “what if the temp drops too much overnight?” / “Do you think her hands should be in or out of the mitts?” / “It’s too warm in her room for the 2.5 tog!” / “Let’s go with an extra singlet layer and the 0.2 tog wondersuit and the 1 tog bag with the arms in and overnight we can change her into the 2.5 tog and oh man, she’s been sucking on the hands of her 2.5 tog and they’re all wet so maybe we can just layer her up and leave her in the 1 tog?”

Like I said, it’s a barrel of fun over here these days.

How much I’ve thought about death.

This one has shaken me. Very early on after she was born, I remember crossing the street and having the unwelcome thought appear in my mind – I can’t get hit by a car. I can’t die. Similarly, when I started driving again, it was with a touch more caution than ever before – I have to get home in one piece. I’m her life source right now. Every time Darcy leaves the house, I find myself thinking, just for a split-second – please make it home again. She needs you. I need you.

There’s nothing quite like holding an entire, tiny, fragile life in your hands and realising it is completely dependent on you for survival, to make you feel confronted with your own mortality.

I want her to be lucky enough to grow up with both parents. I want to be here for all her life’s moments. It’s not just me, myself and I anymore. I’m someone’s mum. The only mum she has. I’m needed in a way I’ve never been before.

I’ve even, at times, thought about her death. Looking at her little body and imagining it becoming an old, wrinkly lady one day. It’s almost inconceivable to picture right now, but it’s an inevitability for us all, if we’re lucky enough to reach old age.

Be in the present with her, I often tell myself. Look how quickly the time is passing already.

I find myself feeling all the realities of life at once – equal parts beautiful, terrifying, bittersweet, nostalgic, magical, alarming, heart-wrenching, painful, joyful, complicated and completely, perfectly uncomplicated.

The intensity of the love.

Before she came, Darcy and I would go on walks together and talk about how we knew, cerebrally, how much we were going to love this child. But it was all anecdotal. We had no idea how it would actually feel. We’d hear people talking about the intensity of the love, how it was unlike anything they’d ever experienced. I even once said – which seems laughable now – “I mean if we can love our dog so much and she’s a completely different species to us, surely the love you feel for your own human child is wild.”

My best friend sent me a message after finding out I was pregnant – “You are about to experience joy beyond your wildest imagination” (except that because she’s the world’s most terrible typer, she wrote “you are abot to experience job beyond youth wildest imagination”) While she may have been, in fact, talking about the job I was about to receive and it having something to do with youth, I chose to interpret her message as the former.

And she was right.

The joy is beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It’s in every single tiny moment. It creeps up on you when you’re least expecting it. It’s in her perfect smile, her perfect nose, her perfect little hands. Watching her experience the world for the first time. Knowing you’d do anything for her. Wondering how you got so lucky. Being so overwhelmed with the love you feel you might burst.

xx Rachael

P.S. What are the things that surprised you the most about those early months of parenting? Tell me in the comments below.

If I feel even the hint of a sniffle, I’m mind-over-mattering that bugger out of my life and it never hangs around for long.

I used to give my poor mum two pages of hand-written instructions when she looked after my dog (despite her having had dogs of her own her entire life).

I’ve never failed a test.

I’ve never been late for anything (like not even my own wedding).

I don’t get drunk or take drugs because I don’t like not having full control over my body and mind.

I find solutions for everything. Don’t do anything by halves. Determined, strong-willed, capable. Type A personality is an understatement. Control freak might be getting warmer. In its best form, it’s highly productive and efficient. At its worst, it’s impatient, with unrelentingly high standards for myself and everyone around me. Just do it should’ve been my own personal catch phrase.

So when I got pregnant, you can bet your bottom dollar I was going to be the most prepared pregnant person that’s ever strolled into a birthing suite.

I went into my birth prep like I go into everything: educated, organised, researched, emotionally/spiritually/mentally “ready”. I was excited, confident, glass half-full. I’d been in training for this day as if I’d been training for a marathon. And when I say I researched, I truly mean – like fully nerded out on everything and anything birth-related I could get my hands on. I listened to about a thousand birth story podcast episodes, read all the books, did all the classes, quizzed my friends hard. I kept hearing “it’s a birth preference, not a plan. You never know what might happen on the day.” I’d smile and nod and do my best “of course, totally understand” face, but deep down I was cocky. Overly confident that I’d be the exception and that my exceptional preparation would 100% result in the birth I wanted.

You can see where this is going, right?

I’d had an extremely cruisy pregnancy. I adored watching my belly grow. I felt fit and strong and healthy all the way through, and I was grateful for that every day. I’d been eating all the right things and taking my vitamins and it was going exactly to plan. I’d go to bed every night visualising my ideal birth. This is how it would go: in the early hours of the morning, sometime between 40 and 41 weeks, I’d wake to my body telling me I was in the early stages of labour. I’d creep out of bed, leaving Darcy fast asleep, and go into the nursery. I had everything ready in there – affirmations on the wall, exercise ball, yoga mat, heat pack, headphones, candles, diffuser with oils, birth comb, snacks and water. I’d put on some music and ride out the first few hours as the sun slowly rose, just me and baby girl, working together in perfect harmony to move her slowly down into my pelvis. Darcy would eventually wake and I’d tell him we were on – we’d have a cute little moment together, full of excited anticipation before he’d call work to say he wouldn’t be in. I’d spend the rest of the day labouring as long as I could and we’d only make our way into the hospital when I was sure she wasn’t too far away. When we eventually got to the birthing suite, we’d meet our midwife and an hour or two later I’d push baby girl out in the calm, dark room with fairy lights glistening and gentle music playing. Blissful, peaceful, intervention-free and exactly how I wanted it to go.

Did I mention I was an idealist?

Cut to – 41 weeks and 5 days and I was still pregnant. Despite all the meditating, acupuncture, curb walking, relaxing, journaling, date-eating, bouncing on the fit ball, raspberry leaf tea, sex, sleep, spicy curries and constantly talking to her, telling her it was safe to come, I was still very, very much pregnant. Still feeling fine. Great, in fact. Still walking the dog, gently exercising, eating and sleeping like normal. My belly wasn’t even looking that low. Where was she? This baby who was constantly moving around inside me, happily kicking away day after day? Apparently she was quite comfortable in there and hadn’t seemed to cotton on to the fact that I had a plan.

From 40 weeks on, our hospital had us coming in every second day for scans and checks of her heartbeat (which was always totally fine). Even so, the obstetricians wanted her out. They were nervous about letting me go to 42 weeks, but I was still clinging to hope that she’d show signs of beginning to come on her own. Our midwives (seriously the most incredible beings on the planet) were diplomatically dancing the precarious dance between trusting my intuition and keeping the doctors happy. We all eventually came to a compromise and at 41 weeks and 6 days, we were going to begin the process of… cue the scary “I” word I’d been dreading for months… induction.

Now when you hear the term “balloon catheter”, what images come to mind? Of course I’d heard of it in my previously-mentioned-deep-and-thorough (and incredibly cerebral) research, but I’d never visualised what it actually was. A literal rubber balloon on the end of a long tube, inserted up there and inflated – one of the strangest sensations I’d ever experienced. The plan was to go home again and hope the pressure of the balloon on my cervix would get this show on the road. So home we went, full of faith and confidence that something would happen overnight.

Are you sensing a theme yet?

Nothing happened.

Just a lot of childish giggling between Darcy and I at the incredibly long dangling cord coming out of me, taped to my inner thigh. My little dongle, I was fondly calling it (if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, right?)

So back we went the following morning for the next step – The Breaking Of The Waters. If I thought the balloon was a strange feeling, that was just the beginning. Nothing quite prepares you for the gush of warm liquid – that is not pee – uncontrollably trickling out of you. It’s at this point I’d like to nominate myself for a gold medal in “World’s Most Optimistic (or Stubborn, take your pick) Pregnant Person”. Because even after having my waters broken, there I was still insisting I give bub time to come by herself. Just to placate me, the midwives (bless them) agreed to Darcy and I going for a walk for the next hour or so. “My body can do this. It’s done everything else it’s supposed to for the entire ten months”, I kept saying. Ah, bless her cotton socks, that girl so completely committed to getting her natural birth. Like everything else I’d done in life up until this point, I was persisting, determined, full of confidence. BUT. I was forgetting one tiny detail – it wasn’t just me here, was it? I wasn’t doing this alone. It wasn’t just my body making or not making this happen. There was a whole other human in there with her own thoughts and feelings and agenda. Did I think I was giving birth to a robot?

You don’t need me to tell you that the walk did a big fat nothing.

And so the process of a full-blown induction began, the synthetic oxytocin pumping through me like a menacing intruder, introducing me to the toughest period of time I’ve ever lived through. Back-to-back contractions pounding through me like unrelenting waves, 100% in my back, 100% intensity. On all fours, roaring like an animal, kicking Darcy in his thighs while he squeezed my hips for hour upon hour upon gruelling hour. How is my body handling this? How is my baby handling this? Isn’t she terrified in there, hearing her mum roar like this? Time was irrelevant. I truly felt like I was on the precipice of life and death. I’m pretty good with pain, and this was hands down a thousand times worse than anything I could have imagined. But with every fresh, horrifying wave, I told myself I was getting closer. Just one step further to meeting her. I refused any meds because I honestly thought I was almost there. This was transition, right? But why was transition lasting so long? Where was she? She had to be close.

She wasn’t close. She was posterior (hence the back labour). A stargazer, one of the doctors called it. She was never coming out the “normal” way, even though we’d actively laboured for eight hours, got to fully dilated, pushed for another two. She didn’t want to turn. Her heartbeat was cool, calm and collected. She was just fine where she was, thank you very much.

At 5.05am the next morning, 21 hours after arriving at the hospital, our baby was born under the bright lights of an operating theatre. No, the birth was not how I’d visualised it. Having a C-section was not how I wanted it to happen. But here’s the thing – it was still, in its own way, beautiful. Darcy and I still had that magical moment when she was lifted up out of me, screaming and pink and perfect. There she was. Ivy. Our little stargazer. They handed her to us and in an instant, the fluorescent room full of doctors evaporated. The harrowing ordeal faded away. It was just the three of us. Our little family. All safe and healthy and together at last.

My journey into motherhood was clearly not how I expected it to be. My baby had other plans for how she was going to be entering the world. It was her birth after all, not mine. My first lesson in what now seems so blatantly obvious – my child is not me. She’s an entirely separate human who’s going to have her own way of doing things and most of the time, no amount of preparation or planning I do is going to change that.

It’s been five months with Ivy in the world now. This joyful, sweet, clever little girl who shows me every single day that I don’t need to control everything. That I can have the world’s greatest expectations, but she’s going to sleep, drink, spew, poo, roll and giggle up at us all on her own timeframe. That the most joyful experiences with her happen in the unexpected moments. She’s showing me how to be in the present. To breathe out. To let go.

A tiny human who may be no more than 6kg, but who’s turning out to be my biggest teacher yet.

(P.S. I’m pleased to report when my beautiful mum comes over to look after her, I haven’t left a single instruction. How’s that for personal growth?!)

Hello!

I’m Rachael, a Melbourne-based freelance writer.

I hereby welcome you to my Substack, Invisible Strings!

If you’ve somehow found yourself here in my little corner of the internet without having a single clue about who I am, let me fill you in on a few important (and some not-so-important) facts...

• I have a background in screenwriting for television.

• I’ve performed as an actor/singer in live theatre across the country.

I’m also…

• A girl mum (to both the dog and human kind).

• A shameless pop music lover.

• An old building enthusiast.

• An oat latte connoisseur/acai bowl fanatic/constant hunter of the perfectly THICK smoothie (whyyy must all the smoothies be so RUNNY?)

• A gym/running/tennis/pilates/walking/swimming/dancing fiend (despite being a writer, I cannot sit still for very long at all… perhaps I’ve chosen the wrong profession for my disposition but that’s a conversation for another time).

• Constantly obsessed with the idea of time – time travel, parallel universes, sliding doors moments (so much so that I’ve just finished my first novel manuscript about time travel, but more on that later).

• A proud user of what is, in my humble opinion, the greatest of all the punctuation marks – the exclamation point!

This is the place where I’ll be flexing the writerly muscles in a more personal way, separate from the rest of my professional writing life. Somewhere to practice and play with my craft. Somewhere to muse, to ponder, to explore themes and topics invading my mind at any given time. A word of warning straight up – I have a five month old baby girl, so expect a lot of parenting stories in the beginning (because, you know… write what you know!)

Why “INVISIBLE STRINGS”?

The idea of the Invisible String (apart from being one of the greatest Taylor Swift songs) fascinates me endlessly. It’s a whimsical, joyful, romantic notion, isn’t it? That we’re connected to the people around us by some unknown, unseen force. That the people in our lives were always meant to be there, no matter the circumstances of our meeting. It makes me wonder about the dance between fate and free will; something we might never know the answer to. It’s something I thought about a lot while I was pregnant – who was this little person growing inside me? Why did she choose us? Where’s she been before? Was there an invisible thread drawing her to me and me to her, predestined? Or was it purely by chance that her particular soul decided to plant itself firmly next to mine?

I like to think that the invisible strings in my life give it meaning. That I’m loving, living, thinking, being, creating, existing for a reason. For me, the idea of the opposite – that everything is random and there’s no bigger purpose to anything – is just too scary and depressing to contemplate. Of course we’ll never know, and we may all just be tiny ants running around aimlessly, thinking our tiny lives have so much more significance than they actually do. But I choose to believe the invisible lines of connection between me and the world around me have a meaning, and that it’s my job while I’m here to try and come as close as possible to figuring out what that meaning actually is.

Ok, that got a little deep. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of nonsense in here amongst the existential ponderings.

For now, if you’re still reading, I’d just like to say thank you for being here. Dare I say some invisible strings might have connected us and lead you to my little writing nook?

Too naff?

Yes, ok, I hear you.

I’m going to go now and feed my baby for the 800^th time this week, so I’ll sign off and speak to you again soon.

xxx Rachael