Fine and Fair: Thank You

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Thank You

Dear Tyler,

Thank you.

Thank you for reacting with joy and excitement when we found out we were pregnant the first time, before we had planned to be. Thank you for helping me research and learn about my birth options. Thank you for watching {affiliate link} Orgasmic Birth with a mostly straight face.Thank you for the ice cream with chopped up candy bars and chocolate sauce. Thank you for helping me pick out cloth diapers.

Thank you for accompanying me to every doctor's appointment. Thank you for supporting me and understanding my sense of grief and loss when we found out that I'd be unable to birth our daughter naturally, as we'd planned. Thank you for not buying into the Doctor's scare tactics when he tried to pressure me to schedule her birth around his vacation. Thank you for getting over swine flu the day before I went into labor.

Thank you for making me laugh while we nervously awaited Delilah's surgical delivery. Thank you for looking so handsome in the OR get-up. Thank you for holding our daughter cheek-to-cheek with me while they sewed me up. Thank you for helping me figure out how to breast feed her when the awful nurse in the recovery room chided me for even trying. Thank you for taking care of me as I recovered, physically and emotionally, from surgical birth and the trying hospital experience that followed it.

Thank you for reacting with joy and excitement when we found out we were pregnant before we had planned to be, again. Thank you for your courage and support as we planned and prepared for a home birth. Thank you for agreeing, without question, not to cut our son.

Thank you for making every midwife appointment a family affair. Thank you for sitting, facing me, cross-legged with your eyes closed, my hands in yours, and listening to birth affirmation hypnosis tracks, even though doing so was crossing the line into "woo-woo" territory for you. Thank you for participating in decorating my belly with henna at my Mama Blessing. Thank you for not bringing me so much ice cream with chopped up candy bars and chocolate sauce, the second time around. Thank you for picking up extra slack around the home and with Delilah so I could be more physically active for a healthier second pregnancy.

Thank you for your incredible love and support throughout a long and hard labor. Thank you for supporting me and understanding and sharing in my sense of grief and loss when our planned home birth turned hospital transfer turned surgical delivery happened. Thank you for advocating for me and for our son in the hospital. Thank you for looking so handsome in the OR get-up, again. Thank you for staying with our son and not letting him out of your sight, to ensure that our wishes for his care were respected. Thank you for all the extra work you took on to allow me time to recover from another surgical birth, and to bond with our new baby.

Thank you for balancing work and home, to be with us as fully and as often as you can. Thank you for being willing to struggle and make due with less, so that I can spend more time at home with our babies while they are still babies. Thank you for working so hard.

Thank you for joining me in gently parenting these beautiful, incredible, amazing human beings we made. Thank you for growing in your understanding of feminism, and why it is important not just for our daughter, but for our son. Thank you for treating our children with kindness, and with respect for the people they are today and the people they might become. Thank you for sharing with them your gift of music.

Thank you for being my friend and partner. Thank you for affirming me as a mother and a wife and a human being on a daily basis. Thank you for making me feel loved, wanted, and beautiful every single day, whether I'm 9 months pregnant, or 6 hours post-partum, or 3 days past my last shower.

Thank you for your strength. For your calm. For your humor. For your commitment. For your honesty. For your trust.

For you.

Thank you for you. Thank you for this beautiful, fun, happy, loving family.