New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and are ready to tackle a new year.  I'm an unabashed optimist about fresh starts. I love the sense of having a blank slate to fill with a mix of all that seems new and exciting balanced by the best of the tried and true.

Here are the three prompts for this week followed by my response to the last one:

• What's the most confused you've ever been? Tell that story.

• That time you tried to do a job well, even though it was stupid.

• Write everything interesting you can about your worst scar (literal or figurative).

My Worst Scar

This is my pregnant belly at 38.5 weeks, the day before I gave birth to my youngest daughter. You can tell I was kind of arching my back to make my stomach protrude as far as possible; I spent the last three months of my pregnancy reassuring acquaintances and total strangers that while I was carrying relatively small, the baby was a completely normal size. Their eyes would usually dart toward my belly as they said something like, "If you say so..."

You can imagine the general surprise when my bundle of joy turned out to be 8 pounds, 2 ounces and 21 inches long. She was my third born via C-section, which makes her partially responsible for my worst scar.

Mira Nicole Moore was born 2/21/11 in Bridgeport, CT

When I took classes at Methodist to prepare for the birth of my first child, I remember stopping to cry near one of the windows on the bridge to the parking garage because I was so afraid I would need a C-section. I didn't want the risks and recovery from major abdominal surgery while caring for a newborn, but more than anything, it was the first taste of the fear that comes with being a mother. Those videos and lectures from the nurse practitioner leading the classes brought home the reality that something could happen to me or--God forbid--to my baby that would negate all the careful preparation and planning for how I wanted to give birth.

Sure enough, after about 12 hours of labor, my little girl's heart rate started dropping with each contraction, and the nurse called the doctor. While we waited for him to arrive, I looked her in the eye and said, "Is he going to tell me I need a C-section?" She said probably so, and I decided right then I wouldn't argue or ask for more time to wait and see how things would develop. Ten minutes later I was in the operating room, and three days later I left the hospital with a healthy newborn and a six-inch incision across my lower abdomen.

After three C-sections, I've learned a few things about scars. For one thing, it's a different scar each time. The first scar was pretty nondescript. The scar after my son's birth was bumpy in the middle. The one I have now is flat and smooth on my left side where the doctor started her sutures. Things must have been harder to manage as she got closer to the end, though, because the right side has a rise and fall to it with a little divot in the spot where she tied off the stitches. I don't have much feeling in the area, and for awhile my daughter's head hit right in that spot when she would give me hugs (which she does about fifty times a day), and it felt odd to see her bury her face in my body and not have a sensation to correspond with the visual. I feel self-conscious about the way it makes my abdomen look a little Frankenstein-ish when I wear bathing suits, but for the most part, I consider it a badge of honor for having brought three children safely into the world.