Marilyn's Baby learning resource PHSE RE Health Education
This is a story of love and lost love in a turbulent, changing world. It is about chance, destiny and life. The settings and the context may change, but the themes are still happening around us today. This could be you.
On the east coast of England, next to the cruel North Sea, the great winter storm unleashed its mighty forces. Monstrous waves helped by the powerful equinox tides assaulted the churning shores. On the pitching merchant coasters trying to shelter in the estuary, anxious skippers watched the barometer make a rapid descent as the centre of the depression approached. In the creeks, barges drag their moorings on the spring tide, beaching high on the foaming tide line. Flowing silently, the surge of water bursts the bank to flood the flat coastal plain. Freezing gales force winds from Baltic blasted blizzards at beleaguered communities.
At the centre of this raging storm, in a small rural hamlet, along a country lane is a bungalow where a young women cries out in a howling scream as the baby breeches at birth.
“No, no, noooooooo! Ooohhhhhhhhh! Aaaaarghhhhhhh. Help! Help me, please! The pain is unbearable. It’s………it’s terrible. Ahhhhhhh. It’s not fair. What’s happening?”
She pants as she collapses through eternal exhaustion. Marilyn screws up her face as tears of fear run down her flushed, sweaty cheeks. Her long black hair sticks to her sweat soaked skin. The sprightly young firm body contorts violently and her head is flung constantly from side to side in reaction to her powerful, thirty-second contractions.
“Ma Ma, hold me tight. Don’t let me go,” as she hoarsely grunts in a whisper as she clasps her mother’s hand.
Breathless, the girl clings to the sheets in agony whilst the baby fights for breath as the mid-wife clears its small pink mouth.
“Nearly there now, one more push, one more big push and it will be over,” as she skillfully guided the new born infant.
As a mature foetus, my changing biochemical’s helped to start my mother’s labour. The oxytocin foetal hormones synchronised and interacted with her inflamed placenta molecules to initiate the vigourous labour process. This caused powerful rhythmic uterine contractions to force me out into the world as you know it. These started the previous evening with intervals of about twenty five minutes and caused pain in the lower part of the back. During this slow first stage, she was aware and in control of herself but as the evening turned to night the intensity and frequency increased.
Marilyn constantly turned, twisted and contorted through the dilatation. After twelve hours the muscular uterus compressed the bag of water surrounding me forcing me down the uterus and opened the cervix even further.
Suddenly, as the cervix became fully dilated, the waters broke causing even greater contractions in my heaving mother. With a fearsome cry at ten o’clock in the morning, part of my head was thrust into the warm heat of bedroom. As I emerged, my mother was in her greatest pain. The mid-wife wiped me and placed me on a nipple whilst the last contractors bore out the placenta.
“Wow! Here is a beautiful, big boy for you. Look at him. Magnificent! You should be proud. He is huge ……… about ten pounds six ounces! I’ll wash and clean him down before you try and feed him to stop his crying down. He’s born hungry and is going to wear you out, he’s a fine brute,” as the mid-wife passed the squirming Joshua to Marilyn.
“Oh let me hold him ……… ummmmmh he’s so warm! Look at him,” as the baby puckered its lips.
As I was gently hugged and fed, my grandmother mopped the brow of my mother Marilyn. She helped wash her and then ensured she was well wrapped up, warm and secure with the newborn baby. This was a time of great love, affection, gentle kindness and support by the family. But someone was missing.
As Marilyn hugged me against her breasts to feed, her mother pulls the bed covers over us and then turns to put more coal onto the roaring fire. The mid-wife, smiles as she watches the newborn child moves its head searching, suckling for mother’s warm milk.
“I think Marilyn’s baby is going to have the temperament of this stormy weather. It’s part of his Aries birth sign. He’s a lively bright and kicking, nine-pound boy.”
Ten thousand miles east, in a distant Asian country, high on the Afganistan mountaintop, his young father is thrown violently backwards as bullets tears through his right arm and neck. Splintered bones and blood explode out of the khaki uniform, as the baby is born. Around the young dying infantry soldier lay the dead and wounded from three days of ferocious battles by the glorious Rifle Regiment. During his lover’s labour, the platoon sergeant was fighting in unison to avoid a violent death and being overrun by the ferocious Taliban soldiers invading from Pakistan. They would never meet again. Now there are only memories of their passionate young love and the legacy of Marilyn’s baby.
Eddy Jackson
eScribe • CareersMentor • Web2 Education
0780 9233 688
www.eddyjackson.co.uk
