First time back in the Five Minute Friday game for a while.

We all just write fun and serious,

fast and furious for five minutes whatever comes out from the prompt.

Then we link it up and we go encourage the person in the line behind us.

Today’s prompt is Ready

I actually felt ready to become a Mum.  I’d read all the right books, watched all the right shows and documentaries and I was actually excited about labour.  I’d been reading Supernatural Childbirth,  and I had my birth ordered.  It was going to take exactly four hours from start to finish, something I’d read about in one of the books and I wasn’t going to have pain.    I had even done a pregnancy consultancy course.  I was so ready.

I’d had my bags packed for weeks, and weeks.  I kept thinking my baby was going to come early because I’d given myself contractions at 20 weeks drinking raspberry leaf tea and teaching dance classes.  I had stopped for the ensuing 18 weeks and gone crazy with those two activities in the last two.

Something else had slipped into my bag too.  It was called pride.  When I watched those tv shows of Mum’s giving birth, I would tell them to ‘suck it up, princess,’  and when anyone else had to have pain relief or a C-Section for goodness sake it was because they hadn’t tried hard enough.

Finally the day after I was due, my waters broke in my garden when I reached for a weed and I was excited and ready.  Even though the midwife wasn’t particularly keen about me coming into the hospital, we hurried because after all my birth was only going to take 4 hour, and I whispered a hurried prayer about not being prideful.

13 hours later after excruciating pain and mournful screams ,  I begged for an epidural which turned into a C-section, and I knew I had tried hard enough, but I  now had a little thing called compassion packed in my bag and pride had run out the door.