Five Years a Mother

Adara will turn five years old tomorrow morning. I decided to post this tonight as we have a fun-filled day ahead, and one in which I want to enjoy and savor each moment rather than be spending time on a an electronic device.

Late July 2009. Adara filling me up inside.

I remember every second of this day -- and the 32 hours that preceded it -- five years ago. Alan, my little sister Ellen and I went grocery shopping at Sprouts, we watched half of the movie The Namesake,  but it paled in comparison to the novel I had just finished with the same title, so we turned it off and cooked fish tacos instead. We went to bed at 9pm. Contractions had already started. Deep within, I knew something amazing was about to happen. Yet I never realized, nor could I have realized, that the next series of hours would change every moment of my life from there on out.

On August 2nd, 2009 I was simply... exhausted. I was filled with an exhaustion and relief like none I had ever known before. After 32 hours of labor, 24 hours of it very intense with vomit and flooding fluids and contractions that sent my brain spinning every 2 minutes for an entire day, I was just happy to be done. I was ready to hold my baby and breathe her in. However, in my moment of utter exhaustion and other-wordly sensations (drug-free sensations as the entire labor and birth was intervention/drug-free), with my entire world spinning I failed to realize that I could not hold my baby. I could not breathe her in. Finally a mother yet no baby to hold. She was already taken. The next minutes and hours that passed were the longest of my life. Longer than those 24 hours of intense labor, longer than that final month weighing nearly as much as my husband and sweating through a hot hot July in the Valley.

Late July 2009 - Ready to be a mother.

Moments before I pushed Adara out, my midwife realized that something was wrong. Entirely focused on the task at hand, and so near the end, with my baby girl's head finally cresting, the nurses and midwife and my husband kept their eyes locked on the monitors and called in for emergency assistance. Adara was born with pneumonia after inhaling meconium, likely due to the length and intensity of my labor and the stress she was under herself with each raging contraction. And so, when Adara was born she had to be taken immediately to the NICU, meconium sucked out, lungs cleaned, placed on breathing tubes and feeding tubes and lots and lots of tubes. That is how I saw my baby girl for the first time ever, 2 hours after delivering her.

The first photo ever of Adara Kelly Jacobsen.

Touching my baby for the first time.

I remember shaking I was so nervous to hold her for the first time...

Pure Love.

Late nights in the NICU holding my Adara.

She was perfect. She was beautiful. She was a fighter. She was my Adara. The girl who made me a mother, who made me strong, who made me perfect, who made me beautiful. Happy Birthday to the sweetest first little baby who is growing up beside me, teaching and showing me the way of motherhood and of life. I love you, Adara.

And I know they all tell you and I know everyone says it, but man, it just all goes by way too fast. What I wouldn't give to go back five years and relive these five years again, just for the fun and the love.