Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

In the end, it was just over an hour. Just over an hour between being asleep on the floor of Auckland hospital, to standing, bewildered under the delivery suite lights, helping to dress my newborn son. Mava had been induced on Sunday – the scans had suggested that all was ok but that our baby was small for his age. We spent an oddly serene day waiting for the induction medication to kick in. They give you a dose every two hours until you go into labour but sometimes it takes a few hours to work and sometimes it takes days. It was actually lovely, in a way. Mava and I both read for hours in-between the doses. We went for coffee and a stroll in the domain, Mava constantly assessing baby’s every shift and every hint of a contraction. My goodness, though, when it happened... it happened. Zero to one hundred. A blur.  I won’t labour you with all of the details but it’s become clear to me that there's a reason every parent has a birth story.  It was surreal. It just felt like a week’s worth of crazy exper