47M so not quite a birth story. I wrote this a couple of years ago when wine drunk and am proud of it

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All three of you arrived silently and then screamed. Alanna you were first and screamed the most. You needed to be taken out by the doctors when you weren’t quite ready, hadn’t had the benefit of whatever chemicals wash through the nervous system during birth to prepare for the moment when light and sound suddenly crashes in like a full stop ending your dark, muffled warm world. Ned, you screamed too but less than your sisters. You emerged slowly and perfectly, heartbeat steady throughout, in my memory a steady inch at a time over hours, until like a bike racing down a hill you sped up and suddenly were here. Trixie, you were somewhere in the middle. You were happy throughout too, got yourself in position and then came quickly like Ned, but arrived maybe a day or two earlier than you wanted so needed to let the world know you weren’t quite ready. All three of you emerged silently and then screamed with life and health, eyes clenched shut and then opening for a moment and then tightly shutting again and I felt relief before I felt love. Your mothers will have a different and more powerful tale to tell, more intense, shot through with pain as well as joy, feeling animal things that I never could. And then all of you were on your mother’s chest within a minute and in my arms within ten and then later carried by me down the corridor, into a lift then out into the cold air and into the car (a Ford, then a Fiat, then a Citroen) for the other-worldly mid-week afternoon journey home in your tiny outfits. And all of you born in the same place too, different rooms but the same floor and all within about fifty metres, in a building on a hill near the sea, where I got taken to as a child thirty-five years earlier to get my knee stitched up (the shadow of the scar is still there), hearing my own parents, your grandparents the same age I am now, saying ‘QA’ and wondering what sort of place that was. Then all of you into the front room in a warm house and a cat coming down the stairs, not knowing what had suddenly changed. All three of you feeling not thinking in those first months, the software lagging behind the hardware, lights and sounds being experienced as pure input. Then building little elemental models of the world piece by piece as things slowly came out of soft focus. Faces meaning food or comfort. Dark and quiet going together. Understanding yourself as a distinct element separate from your surroundings coming much later, so that in the beginning you were each pure feeling, a pure state of being, loved and not knowing that anything else exists.