A Reminder
For me. For you. For a world I can still imagine. For our daughters.
I wrote this on December 6th, 2024, the 35th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. 14 women were murdered on that day a L’Ecole Polytechnique by a man who did so BECAUSE they were women. Just a week before I met Nathalie Provost, one of the women who survived that massacre and who has been fighting ever since for the safety and protection of women.
I wrote this because that fight feels never ending. Especially right now.
I wrote this to remind myself of the world I promised my daughter.
*Please read with care—warning for discussion of sexual assault.
The whole time I was pregnant with my second child, I was convinced I was having a boy. I had one boy already and being a boy-mom was what I knew. Don't ask me why but I thought I was meant to only have boy children. (and yes, I realize how binary my thinking was on this…)
I should have known this wasn't the case early on in my second pregnancy—which was light years different than my first one. That one was hard. With my first child I was classified as a high-risk pregnancy at 28 weeks. I was on bedrest until I was induced at 35 weeks and gave birth to a 3 lb, 10 oz preemie. The second time around, as a precaution because of my previous experience, I was put on a high risk neonatal protocol—monthly ultrasounds, more frequent OB appointments, low stress work—just in case. And then I had no issues at all, no high blood pressure, no pre-eclampsia, baby growing like gangbusters!
Despite all the ultrasounds we had, I refused to find out the sex of our child ahead of time. I figured I didn't need to because, like I said, I knew it was a boy. I also expected to give birth early again and was annoyed when at 38 weeks, there was no sign of this happening anytime soon. I was induced at 42 weeks and on Tuesday morning in mid-October, after 12 hours of labour, our second child entered the world.
"It's a girl", my husband said.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
He confirmed this and went to her while the L&D and neonatal teams checked her out because of a meconium birth. While they did that, I laid in the hospital bed waiting to deliver the placenta while also trying to calm the squeezing panic starting to engulf my chest. A feeling that had started the moment my husband announced her gender. A moment in which I saw a version of "my life flashing before my eyes".
My life as a girl.
On a day when I should have been feeling all kinds of joy bringing my child into the world, I was thinking about every time I experienced an assault on my being because I was a girl. I relived every one of those life-altering experiences in those few minutes alone in the delivery room and can only thank the amount of oxytocin flowing through my blood vessels for keeping me from a full blown panic attack.
I remembered the time I was sexually assaulted by a "trusted" neighbour-a fifty year old man who would regularly have kids sleep over while his wife worked nights as a nurse—and our parents would let us because he was the only house in our neighbourhood that had Superchannel! By my babysitter-a boy only a few years older than me—who pinned me face down on the couch and slid his hands up my top to fondle my budding breasts. By my best friend's dad who, when I was at thier house for a sleepover, came up behind me while I was getting a glass of water and whispered disgusting things in my ear. And by my sixth grade teacher, who took me into the supply room to 'comfort' me after a bully had punched me in the stomach.
I thought about how I was now going to have to protect my new baby girl from all of this, from a world and a society that does not like girls and women.
I also thought about all the years I had spent hating my body. Wanting to be 10 pounds lighter, to be a different pant size, to have a flatter stomach and perkier breasts. I thought about who and where I learned that this was what I was supposed to aspire to. I wondered how I was going to save her from three generations of women in our family who grew up with body shame as our mother tongue.
As my doctor delivered the placenta and stitched up my second degree tear, I was somewhere else. A liminal space between the reality of the beautiful moment I was in and a far too real and painful past. I relived a whole life in that small amount of time and imagined a different one too. The nurses and my husband came back in the room with my baby girl cleaned up and wrapped in a blanket. I unwrapped her, put her on my naked chest and let her root her way to my breast, where she latched on almost immediately and stayed for the next 45 minutes.
She was eight pounds, three ounces of slightly overcooked human, most of her still covered in white, waxy, vernix—the in-utero protective coating I was loathe to wash off her until I could figure out another one for her on the outside. While she was excelling at nursing, I was tracing every curve of her teeny body, every finger and toe, every roll on her little arms and legs, and telling her how much I loved her and how much I loved her body. One that I made, inside my own.
Maybe it was the oxytocin being released from breastfeeding, or the endorphins from a long and unmedicated birth, but in that first hour after we were separated-but-still-attached, my nervous system started to calm down and all I wanted was for her to be on me. She spent most of her first night latched on to one breast or another. I spent the night memorizing every inch of her and coming to terms with being the mother of a daughter. I swore to her I wouldn’t perpetuate the cycle of shame and apology I grew up with. I made promises to her about the kind of world I would fight to make for her every single day.
A world where on the day when/if she gives birth to a daughter, fear and terror are not the first things she feels.
We are not there yet…
N~