August Martin Messinger was born on 10/4/24 at 5:23pm. My heart is now living outside of my body. To put it gently, things went dramatically different than the home birth we had planned for. After 24 hours of labor and 6 hours of pushing, John sped through rush hour traffic to get me to the hospital for an emergency c-section, me roaring every 30 seconds with a new surge. While recovering from surgery, I began hemorrhaging and lost a significant amount of blood due to all the stress on my body from labor. I’m okay now, and recovering much more quickly than anyone at the hospital anticipated. I have no words for the gratitude I feel. A few weeks before August was born, I got a ping from him. “I need to know it’s safe for me to come out,” he said. We had been dealing with mold and moves throughout my pregnancy so I figured he was referring to our living situation and his papa’s health. But now I know that August knew it wasn’t safe for him to come out at home because it would have put my life at risk. 🥹 We are home now, in a cocoon of love and safety and peace, falling more in love with each other by the second. August is peaceful, wise, deep, sensitive. It feels like he’s been here before. Getting to know him, and watching him become more of himself each day, fills me with reverence and delight. He is already teaching me so much—how to feel more deeply, how to open my heart even more, how to let the ache of his discomfort rumble through me rather than freezing when he cries. I’m loving and soaking it all up—savoring this moment of timelessness that we are in. In truth, I never knew I would love being a mama so much. It’s never a role I felt called toward, and it’s one I felt a lot of fear and pause about stepping into. “I want to be a mom, right???” I texted a friend a few weeks ago. I wasn’t sure I was cut out for the role, my creative ambitions and autonomy are so important to me, blah blah blah. But this is more meaningful than anything I could have imagined—the greatest honor of my life. ♥️