Author Archives: Evita
Aitutaki escape
haumea aitutaki
Half a year with us !
6 months old
filled with love
OMG, I am so filed with love. Perhaps overfilled with love, it keeps spilling out. Your dad always keeps giving me more reasons to love him more but you have opened me to that, until now, unknown kind of love. I just came back from the vaccination, I loved you when you cried and hurt with you and it really really hurt me when you felt the pain. You see the other person I love with no limits is your dad and I feel bad for him when he doesn’t feel good, I feel sympathetic and I want him to feel better, I am sad about his pain but I do not suffer with him.
With you it’s so different. I would so much rather feel your pain instead of you and it hurts me too. And I love you
Then I love you again when you stop crying and are being really brave and strong, then I hold you and you snuggle up to me, put your head on my breast, turn towards me so no one else can see your face. I love you again.
Your dad said he keeps falling in love with me over and over again each day and sometimes I ask him so today? And he tells me yes, several times and I ask when and sometimes there are the most funny or peculiar reasons I would never think could make anyone fall in love with me but he says it makes him fall in love again.
I don’t know if you can fall in love with your baby but I experience these waves of love all the time. Then I love you again when you laugh to all the ladies at marcus’s office, wrinkle your little nose and they can’t believe that you just came back from your vaccination – you are not moody or crying, you are just happy little you, curious and beautiful
Then I put you on the floor of the car on the blankets your dad spread. We didn’t take your chair and I was picking up the car from his work so we had to come up with a way to drive you. And you are happy there and smile to me and I love you again and I love you when you fall asleep. I didn’t want to wake you up when we came back home. Now there is high tide and I could sneak pout for a little swim but I prefer to write this because there was so much love in me I had to spread it out and I am thinking I am crazy, when ever before I would have miss a swim in the lagoon to talk to someone and here I don’t even talk to you, I just write for you to read it, probably years and years down the road.
Well, love is strange and crazy. Can’t wait to talk to you, soon I hope you will be able to talk back. You seem to understand so much now and you know now about object permanence, when we hide something from you, you know it is still there, you look behind, you try to get to it. You also realise if something is too far for you to reach but as soon as something comes within your reach you will surely get you hands on it. And you are not even 6 months old yet.
Now I just can’t wait till you wake up, can’t wait till your dad comes back home!
Love you and this makes me so so happy
you make each day so different…
Time is now measured by new things you learn and do. You growing up, last time I sat you on the airport scale you were 7 kg at 5,5 months. when you finished 3 months you started turning onto your tummy, you would cry because it frustrated you that you cannot crawl and since you could not turn back someone always need to come to your rescue.
Now you can sit by yourself, you can feed yourself from a bottle, tip it to get every last drop out and a couple of days ago I found out with excitement that you learned not to throw the bottle too far away, now you are in full control and can find a bottle lying next to you close enough, pick it with one hand by the teat, drag it towards you then grab in both hands and lift it to your mouth. Somehow you just worked it out.
You had your first real bath in the sea last week, potty training today and when you are upset you now say mamama mam ma mam
You are becoming your own little person now, we enjoy having you with us so much.
I am writing this not so much for you but for us so we remember these big moments in your little life and for your family in Poland and Germany.
In two days there is your dad’s birthday and we want to celebrate it in Aitutaki, if we find someone to help us with you on the boat then we will take you with us:)
We just watched a beautiful Argentinian movie El baile de la Victoria while you were asleep and we ate baba ganush, chicken, tomatoes with garlic yoghurt dressing, jasmine rice and grilled eggplant. You are still asleep but you will wake up soon hungry. I will feed you while your dad will read us a new book by Ian McEwan, you in my arms, I in his, then when you are asleep we we will gently carry you to your new bed in the other room. We had to buy you a portacot because you were all over the floor, getting off your mattress, now you are safe and close to us..
And this is you at 5 and 5,5 months
love
mamamam mma ma
memories from Europe
Never miss a chance so you never regret
She lived for 93 years, 32 918 days. I spent only half of that day with her and i will always remember this. You were there too little one, sitting clumsily and a bit uncomfortably on her lap, touching her hand with your tiny baby fingers, bringing smile to her face. You met Grand Oma Edith, Your grandad’s mum.
I regret I havent had a chance to get to know her better, i just heard many wonderful things about her from your dad who was very close to her and for whom she was very important, who he loved very much. I never had a chance to meet his other grandma or granddads, we met too late in life. My grandmums and grandads had passed away by then too. But I did meet Oma Edith one beautiful sunny day during our first family trip to Europe. You were just over 3 months old so it might be too early for you to remember but I will hope that there will be somewhere in, you a little soft feeling, glimpse of memory of your contact with that wonderful older lady.
We went to visit Oma Edith on the 3rd of Septemeber, a month before she passed away. We did not know if she will remember the good news we were bringing to her, about our love, marriage and you my little Darling. Oma had some troubles remembering new things she was told. Your Oma and Opa told her about Marcus getting married and having a child and even though this made her really happy she did not remember it by the enxt time they visited her, so they thought, so they needed to repeat the news and she was happy again. Yet when we came to see her she knew perfectly well, despite some short memory problems many older people have, who we were. She loved seeing her dear grandson and she squeezed my hand and kissed me and told me how happy she was that Marcus and I found each other. She knew who you were and she watched you asleep on the chair next to her and when you woke up I sat you on her lap and she cuddled and stroked you. She was happy.
At some point she turned to me, took my hand and pulled me towards her. “i love you, as much as i love Marcus” she said. first i thought she might have mistaken me with someone from her family. But i was her family and she was talking to me. She squeezed my hand and kissed it and said she is so happy to see Marcus happy and in love and that she loved us very much. Marcus said this means a lot because she loves him a lot and obviously she realised i was a part of him. She never forgot after this that her dear grandson was married, that he had me and you and that we made him happy as he never was before.
That was the last day Marcus spent with his grandma but he will always love her. A month after this wonderful meeting a great woman passed away. She was loved by all her children and grandchildren and spent her last days surrounded by them. Remember this my sweetheart, this is how i hope you will be, loved and respected by everyone. She will be also missed by everyone but her life was long and meaningful. She was surrounded by love when she was departing and she left a lot of love in the world in the lifes of all her children and future generations, the love which is and will continue to be a response to the love she once gave to others.
I hope you will learn about her from your dad but most of all from your opa, i hope he will find time and inspiration to write to you about his mum but if not then one day soon you can sit on his lap and ask him to tell you stories about grand Oma Edith.
the morning smile
Sometimes I may write these blogs in the third person. At times the writting seems easier when you step out and look at things from a different angle, you become an observer of your life, a narrator of the story.
Some things I would also like to share not just with you our sweet baby girl but also with others, with our families, friends, people who may never thought about having children and parenthood looks to them like a boring full time job, a drastic and dramatic change to your life, all for worse, a burden and a drag. These people, funnily enough, are quite similar to me, as I used to be before you changed my world. Maybe not this extend but I also thought that becoming a mother would be such a change to my free spirited lifestyle, i did not really want to take a risk. i knew at some point there may be something i may miss out on but to make a conscious deccission was to me like leaving a place you know, sunny, friendly, exciting and going some new place where things will be different, they may be even better but if not there won’t be a way back.
I hope you will read it once too, maybe when you are a young woman and think about motherhood yourself and maybe reading this as a story and not a letter to you will make this sound more universal. I don’t know how easy it will be for you to listen when your mum talks, how intimate we will be able to be with each other so perhaps making it a third person story will make t more comfortable. I hope though that we will know each other well like I never knew my grandma, like I still don’t know my mother. There are questions that does not seem easy to ask your parents, but maybe it is just the way I was brought up, the parents were more of an authority, someone who was there to tell you what to do not to share what they did. maybe it will be different now, I hope we will be your parents and your best friends. I love you darling…
~~~~~Morning Smiles~~~~~~~~~
There was not a morning in the last weeks when Haumea would cry at night or wake us up crying in the morning. She is still in our room, mainly because it makes feeding easier. I also don’t believe this little being so used to my body and human contact, that little being that arrived in this world not long ago and everything is new and different, should be put in the room alone. Of course that little new person has to learn how to be on her own but this can be a gentle, gradual process. let her be on her own during the day, looking around, discovering, when she feels unhappy she will cry and then mama will be there, she will know that mama is never far away, then when things around her become more familiar mama will be there but maybe not always all the time around, she will come and touch, she will say something and then go away again.
In the evenings when i feed her she falls asleep happily on my body, cuddled onto me but the moment i pull her away she starts crying. So she is more happy falling asleep listening to the voice of her dad reading a novel to her mum before they fall asleep, she is more happy waking up and knowing that people she knows who love her are right next to her.
This shows so clearly, when i wake up i often see her big eyes watching me, she is happy playing with her hands, stretching, watching her parents asleep in each other arms, when I lean above her, touch her face or say hello she smiles. She smiles that beautiful bright happy baby smile, toothless, open mouthed the most beautiful smile I have seen, the one that warms my heart. she lets us wake up slowly and spend time together, sometimes she says something and we laugh or make a baby noise back while looking at each other enjoying the morning together. I may drift off into a light dreamy sleepy state on marcus’s arm for few more moments while he strokes my neck and hair and the baby is happy too and waits. As imptient as she is to get her feed the rest of the day she always waits patiently in the mornings, happy each time we look at her and when we finally pull her to us I often sit her on my tummy leaning her against my legs so she faces us so we can get few more of these happy morning smiles before i put her onto my breast and marcus will go to make some fresh coffee
Despite of that joy of having my babygirl close to me and seeing her happy face first thing in the morning I know i have to soon make her a cosy space in the other room so that she can make her first step to independence and we can have our intimacy without baby affecting our relationship. at the moment the love flows freely between all of us, if anything, my love to marcus became stronger because of how carring he is, because of the knowledge how strong our relationship is. i do not want to replace what i feel for him with my new overwhelming feelings for the baby. now the relationship is deeper and having baby with us and working around her sleeping and feeding time may be fun but won’t wor just as well in the long run and when the baby is bigger and observes things around her with far greater comprehension.
I haven’t just became a mother and stopped being who I was before from one day to the other. To connect a womanhood and a motherhood, to remain being who you were and becoming something else on top of it not instead is a challenge but this is what i would like to master . i suddenly realise that being a desirable woman is nothing when you don’t have a child. firstly you did not experience yet the essence of that womanhood secondly you often needed to do nothing to be who you were, the attraction depends in such a great percentage on how you look and a natural behavior you have, once you become a mother you need to make a conscious effort to be a woman, an object of desire, you work against nature almost, you master who you want to be, you have to design it. the nature may tell you that now your life is for the baby and your womanhood is to cater for that new life, you do not need a partner to procreate, you just fulfilled your role and should be now satisfied. but we do not live in the era when this was exactly the truth. We can still enjoy being a woman whilst being a mum. we can fulfill two different roles at the same time. yes it is a challenge , one is easy, you just drop into it or put yourself in it and stay, once you there you just carry on. Unfoprtunatelly being a mum and a lover at the same time is not possible and so in one moment you have to change. luckily I think I know it is stil in me, both the lover and the mum. as I have discovered on occasions you may be at the same time too, this is a challenge for your partner, he can now enjoy a different type of lover, a strong feminine being whose body is that of a miracle, it carried the baby and fulfilled it’s one of its feminine role, but just one, the other one is still there to be fulfilled over and over again. . “So the baby is still sleeping in your bed” asked someone i know’ “She is in the same room close to us so we can pull her to bed when I need to feed her in the middle of night. Some nightes I sleep on her side, sometimes Marcus does and he gives the baby to me, it’s easier when she still needs requires to be breastfeed at night but we will soon start putting her in the other room” ‘our is already 1.5 year old and STILL sleap in our bed” it seems that for his little baby who he loves a lot that man had to give something up.
perhaps in some cultures a woman who just delivered and is now nursing her child may not be sexy for the man but it seems that it is mostly women who seem to change and focus their attention entirely elsewhere.
After our beautiful babygirl was born i never felt more loved and desired by Marcus. And even though there was now more things o do and someone else to love I never wanted to give him more either, feeling so close to him and united by this miracle of life that happened right in front of our eyes, between us.
The latest books hip books about preganncy, nursing and bringing up babies in France, “bringing up bebe”
living island life
the last days were busy with friends visits, Ui Ariki festival, bread making, long talks and movies and heaps of TLC. you seem to have some growth spurt again and consume copious amounts of milk, still you were lighter than a sigle plate of food filled wth pork, taro and chicken which we were given at the Ui Ariki celebration.
I spoke to my good girlfriend a couple of days ago, here i was, the one people always found so free spirited, full of crazy ideas, never settled, always curious, always going somewhere and always suprising. Suprising I was. Iza still can’t believe when she talks to me that I have a little baby of mine in my arms, it’s only when I stop the conversation to say a few words to you, cheer you up or answer your grooing that this fact hits her. And here I was telling her to make herself a baby. I care for her, she is a good friend even though we see each other so rarely, and i know that from her perspective now having a baby is not at all an appealing option. I could look at other families and I know if you didn’t happen to me watching some other happy parents and kids would never make me think of motherhood. I did not feel I was missing anything and I was scared of that huge commitment. it seemed like the baby would change my carefree life, would fill my house with baby toys, food stains and baby’s cry.
Why is it like this that if someone buys a new car everyone wants it, noone sees it as a source of an expense, fuel consuming machine that polutes the air, a place in which you can get stuck in a traffic jam…it has bad points too after all.
So only now I learn that the house doesn’t need to be filled with baby toys, you don’t need all that baby crap everyone buys, mattresses, chairs, beds, all the special things the producers tell you the baby needs. All that baby needs is your love and care and a healthy warm place to live and you need just a bit of imagination and inventiveness and can create spaces comfortable for the baby anywhere you go from things you have at hand. And any evil things we see in having a baby are well compensated by that overwhelming love love you feel to that little creature, joy it gives holding them in your arms, feeling their warmth, hearing them breath, tenderness they awake in you.
When you watch a stranger halling about their baby trying to pull the arms through the sleeves of a romper you feel they are wasting so much time on trivial boring things like this all day long now but when you do it gains a different meaning, you are giving something to someone else, someone who trully needs it and needs you. giving is beautiful but giving anything to another adult is never that much fun. You may find that you are being taken advantage of and you never know that who you give it to truly deserves it or it would have been better to give those limited resources of time or money to someone else. with baby there is no question like this. giving is a pure joy. And for a woman dressing up and feeding the baby suddenly brings back the childhood times of dressing dolls
so here you are sleeping in an adult hammock in your little car seat carefully placed inside, sides of the hammock clipped with clothes pegs to the side of the handle to create a nice little cocoon around you shielding you from the wind. We siwn you a couple of times and with the waves leaping underneathh you, the distant sound of the surf you fall asleep to dream some happy dreams I hope
When you start waking up i pick you up, knowing well that when you discover you are waking up alone you will start crying and won’t stop until I start feeding you. You make a funny face first and in the past you would start crying anyway because you always wake up hungry but now hearing my voice you trust you get your milk soon and you smile faintly and say uugh and i feel swarm by a huge wave of love and all that is missing now is marcus beside me because I so would like to share this with him and that love is always for you and him at the same time
so i start feeding you and give him a ring and he tells me he bought nu for me and fresh tuna for sashimi for us and that he loves me and will hurry back home and the world is …just perfect
We woke up and …we were a family
It was a hard labour. There was a lot of pain with first contractions already 3-4 minutes apart, lasted for 16 hours. We woke up at 2, drove to the hospital at 4.30 when the pain started becoming unbearable. I went straight into the delivery room and from then onwards, apart from one quick visit to the bathroom, Marcus stayed with me holding my hand kissing my forehead, stroking my back, for 12 or 13 hours non stop, all that time standing not minding pain in his feet, not minding discomfort, all he worried was me and that he cannot take this pain away that there is so little he can do. But he made a world of difference. I can’t even imagine how it would be without him I know at some point he cried and said something so unbelievably beautiful but I couldn’t remember his words later, I just remember his beautiful face full of concern and love and mix of pain and pride.
Some people from his work and Dion came to visit, someone let them into the delivery room and i saw them in between my contractions but this is all a haze, I knew they brought words of encouragement and mountain of gifts.
Then the time came to push. People say you forget the pain…it was not the pain though that I will remember, it was a terror and fear for my baby and I don’t think I will ever forget this. I was exhausted and though, after last medication, my contractions became shorter and less painful it meant I now had shorter windows to push.
During the next hour I tried over and over again, giving everything from myself, making inhuman almost efforts but still it was pointless and i felt so helpless. And there was marcus always there, reapiting quiet words of love, reassuring me, my husband, your dad, waiting for you to come to this world and being there for both of us.
Whatever I was doing, after a short success when the baby’s head appeared at the opening, I could not get the baby out. Something was wrong. I cried and screamed in pain by then, I was scared, I felt I am failing my little baby. Marcus’s constant reassurance and his hand stroking my face was the only thing I could hang on to not to break. I had no more strengh on my own, the only strength i was now getting from him.
There were two midwifes and two doctors with us. The Burmese doctor looked like a graduate in his katmandu jumper, the other one was wearing a t-shirt with a sign picturing a married couple titled “game over”. Midwives Tai and Tauvaine tried hard to direct me to push more effectively. With my legs prompt on their hips I did push as hard as I could, I felt a ring of fire down there, there was pressure in every muscle, in felt like the skin is tearing yet there was no more progress. I had no more strength to scream or cry.
One hour of sweat and pain passed and the head was still in the same place. Now everyone was getting stressed. ‘you have to push the baby out. We don’t have much time, we have to get her out now, she was too long there, push, try” “Don’t you think I am trying, do you think I want to keep her there?? Like I don’t want her out?” I cried now in frustration and by now also in a panic myself not knowing what is gonna happen to my baby if I don’t succeed right there and then. Dr Linn decided he will help me with the suction cap. everything inside me felt raw but all that mattered now was to get the baby out.
Then there was a painful injection bursting under the skin of my vagina, doctor saying he will have to cut me and use the forcipes, things bursting and tearing and pain.
Despite the injection an i felt unbelievable pain when the heavy clumps were pushed inside even though I felt almost dead inside, paralised with fear that those cold hard things are now closing around my baby’s head to pull her out of me. I pushed with all my power when the doctor said he was ready, determined to save pain to my baby girl. “i can’t see how you could push that hard when the doctor had to pull with all his strength and it was still damn difficult to pull the head through even though you were not cut open” said marcus later.
With me pushing and the doctor pulling the little head finally popped out just like a cork from a well corked bottle of wine. A limp little body followed a couple of moments later and I just prayed for that baby scream
I don’t remember much after I felt little slippery body being put on my breast, tears of fear and pain and unbelievable joy and release. Someone asked Marcus of he wants to cut the umbilical cprd, someone handed the baby to him, he was next to me hugging me, someone took the baby to weigh and put in a warm place, I asked Marcus to go and see her and tell me everything is ok. I don’t know how I got to bed who attached the drip onto my arm, I just remember being in Marcus’s arms, the nurse bring the baby and me holding this beautiful little person in my arms, with Marcus’s arms around me, both of us stroking in amazement little head watching that pretty dear little face pressing to my breast when the baby starts sucking. Suddenly our lives changed and opened up to that completely new kind of love, unknown until then. That very moment I knew I will always, always love her. I saw love in Marcus’s eyes, both to me and the baby, all so overwhelming. I don’t know when I fell asleep, I know the baby was in the cot next to us and Marcus put her on my breast again some time at night and when we woke up sudenly….we were a family
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