The moment

Disclaimer: This is a blog related to motherhood.
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There are some moments in life that one would never forget. Memories of those moments, that grow stronger over time. The ones you cherish, treasure and replay time and again in your conscience, when happy or when sad, alike. Counting such moments in life would tell you how many times your life was near-perfect.

My magic moment was when I saw her for the first time ever. She came to our lives 3 weeks before the expected date. Over the 9 months we spent, counting the day of her arrival, I had imagined her with many faces. But nothing had prepared me to the beauty of the perfect little person who was handed over to me by the nurse. Maybe, all mothers feel the same way. Technically, it was the second time I saw her, when I actually saw her. I have a very poor eyesight and my doctor decided to let me go blind before the surgery. So my precious spectacles were handed over to the shivering hands of my mom, along with my other belongings.

Apparently, when after 10 minutes of the surgery, the doctor lifted up a tiny, screaming infant and showed me, I could see nothing, it was infact precisely a bee view, which consists of numerous blurred dots and nothing else. God! I could not even get a chance to count her fingers!

So, as I lay on the ICU bed a few hours after the C-section, with one bottle each hanging on either side of me, one pumping the IV fluid and the other pumping my husband Rajeev's blood into me (he still claims that I turned royal the day he donated his blood for me ;)), all that I could think of was meeting my daughter. I could hear her crying intermittently in the NICU which was side by the ICU. I waited and waited.

It might be a mother's instinct or anything you might call it, but the moment the nurse walked in with a baby, I knew she was mine. She was wrapped in a peach colored cloth and had a pink band around her wrist, with the name 'Baby of Vidya'. A few hours into the world, the link of the umbilical cord lost after 9 months, she was still connected to me through my name, and she would be, I was sure, for the rest of our lives together, one way or the other.

She was hungry and she needed her mother. The nurse helped me hold her. The first thing I noticed about her was her chin. She had a long chin, just like me and Rajeev. Her color was a shade of pink, as with most new born babies. She had long artistic fingers (ofcourse, there were all the ten, I managed to count them), she might turn to be an artist or a writer some day. Her eyes were large, bright and black. She stared expectantly at me, with quivering lips, yes, she was hungry.

As I held her close to my bosom, I knew that my life would never be the same again. I was a mother and my daughter was the new definition of my life. She was not a guest or an angel from heaven, paying us a visit. She was the living, little, warm human, whose heartbeat would be the rhythm of our life, whose breath would be the fragrance of our days here and whose smile would be our greatest joy.

That was my moment.