I am not superstitious
I wouldn’t call myself superstitious. I will happily walk under a ladder, jump on the cracks of the pavement, and definitely don’t feel the need to salute a magpie that flies across my path. However, I have always had this gut wrenching feeling that I can’t be the first person to hold my baby when they are born, in fear something terrible would happen. Ted was born on August 17th 2007, and due to circumstances, I was giving birth to him on my own. The midwife who delivered Ted was also in the room on her own, so despite it being in bold letters “Do not hand the baby to mum first”, she informed me she would have to give me the baby, or she would have to put him on the floor, and she wasn’t allowed to put him on the floor. She handed him to me, and the first words I said were; “Please don’t let him die.”
He was healthy, there were no complications, and he was also my third child, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t done this before. Little did I know in five short months my daily mantra with Ted would be “Please don’t let him die.” He was a baby who was in a hurry to do everything. He was sitting very early, crawling at four and a half months and pulling himself up on furniture at five months. In the January, when he was five months old, Ted got an ear infection. Again, he wasn’t my first so knew it would pass, but something changed. He was given antibiotics, about five courses in all, and the ear infection eventually cleared, but things weren’t right. My happy determined baby, was no longer happy. He cried and screamed for about 18 hours out of 24 every single day.