For many years, having a child was the thing I desired most of all. Unlike other desires, I couldn’t articulate why. It was beyond language. I want to study blah because blah; I want to work at blah because blah. Obvious, easy. Why did I want a child? I just did. My cells did. For all my concern about bringing another carbon footprint into the world, I couldn’t hush a life-longing, that I put aside until the time was right.

When I try to explain the complex emotions of pregnancy, the words elude me. I am consumed by fear and desire for the baby. Fear that she will die inside me; hope that she will be alive when she comes out. My happiness is anchored to something I cannot control. It is not entirely comfortable. It is not the pastel-hued seventh heaven that pregnancy books speak of. Suddenly, I have so much more to lose.

I become pregnant sometime in December and am immediately sick for five months. From the moment I wake to the moment I sleep, I am nauseous. Every other day, I puke bile the colour of sunflowers. I cast around for literature, words to find myself – ourselves – in. I need to get my head around the weirdness of sharing my body with another and my changing sense of self. There is a new, practical language to learn. Episiotomy. Surge. Latch. Tongue-tie. Dilation. D-MER, or, Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex (the sudden decrease in dopamine that occurs as some women begin to breastfeed.) Intervention. Anterior lip.

My husband and I arrive at the hospital. I am bent double. My body has been contracting every four or five minutes for 22 hours. When the muscles of my uterus tighten, the energy surges up through my body and into my throat.

Go for a walk when the contractions start, I was told. Sleep. Bake brownies. Bake brownies? As the first contraction hits, a quake disturbs internal tectonic plates that shift and scrape and shake and ache, crescendoing over 90 seconds before a short break. It is a white-hot, searing rumble, unlike any pain I’ve experienced. It is not like a period cramp, or a cut, or bruising. It is in the ore of me – and it is odd, mysterious and frightening.

I breathe and moan in the waiting room, waiting for the opening of my cervix, the innermost slit, a taut doughnut of pale pink muscle. A kind midwife sticks her fingers inside my vagina to measure my cervix but it is only 2cm dilated. Nowhere near the 10cm needed for our baby to squeeze through. We are sent home.

Eight hours later, we return. I have been in labour for 30 hours now. I had no idea it could take this long. I have missed two nights’ sleep and barely eaten since Saturday morning. It is Monday. How will I find the energy to birth my baby?

We wait to be seen. There are two other labouring women in the shadows. I’m surprised by how little I care that others can hear my undignified moos. After an hour or so, I get on the gas and air and it is heaven, for a while. My cervix is examined again. 4cm: enough to be admitted. (As my cervix effaces, so too does my previous self, my identity. As she is readying to be born, part of me is dying. I don’t realise this until later.)

The birthing suite is windowless, so I soon lose all sense of time. It is a large space with a bathtub, double bed and equipment to sit or squat on, or lean over. My birthing cave. I contract for some hours, gripping the pillow I’ve brought from home, gulping Entonox. Another examination. Still 4cm, after 33 hours. The midwife offers to break my waters to speed things up. I agree, she pierces the sac with a small crochet hook and a warm amniotic lake soaks the towels on the wipe-clean bed. A dial is turned up, the contractions intensify, juddering through me, around 350 tidal waves in total. I had planned not to use pain relief, but I want the opioid pethidine now. Let’s try the water first, they say, because you can’t use the bath after taking a painkiller. I am in the bath, gas and air pipe clamped between my teeth. And then, I start tripping.

A procession of characters that I recognise from preverbal childhood dances in front of me. Objects from the depths of my inner psyche are here to spur me on. A gunky slice of volcanic lava cake, crimson and egg-yolk yellow. With eyes and spindly legs. Three rabbits in woollen shoes, tap dancing. A frog playing a creaking accordion. A hedgehog waltzing. A hare called Mr Tibbins. I am delirious with pain, the gas and air and the psychedelic story that is playing out for me. It gives me succour. I think this is what they call “transition”. It is one helluva wormhole.

At one point, it appears the baby may tear through my perineum, so I’m swiftly moved into another stance. Over the next couple of hours, I am placed in various positions to harness the force of gravity: all fours, a sort-of chair, kneeling and finally, lying on my side with one leg on a midwife’s shoulder because, by then, I’m too tired to hold myself up.

I trust the midwives and my husband, but surely I am dying or at least splitting in half. Cut her out, cut her out, cut her out. I am birthing a hurricane. A spiked mace. A heap of barbed wire. A bladed melon. An inflated pufferfish. A prickle of hedgehogs. A Christmas tree.

Her heart rate has dropped and she is in jeopardy. The red emergency button above the bed is pressed. Doctors fill the room in seconds. A man asks permission to use a ventouse to suck her into the world. I can barely speak, so nod. I have never wanted anything more than to get the baby out and for her to be alive and healthy. I pool my last drops of strength into a final push. She breaks through and spurts out. Her dark eyes are humongously wide. Her hands are splayed open. She is placed on my chest. My heart explodes.

For years, my mother told me the pain of childbirth was fine, that my large feet would make it easy. Then she broke rank. She told me it was really bad and questioned my decision to do it without drugs.

And still, it is not finished. Do I want an injection to speed up the placenta’s ejection? After 43 hours, I’m over my wish for an intervention-free birth. It flops out after 10 minutes or so. I ask if I can see it before they take it away. (To where? A bin? The sea?) It is surprisingly navy; bulbous, slimy and as big as a beret. I look around and, well, my cave resembles a crime scene. Quickly and briskly, the blood and mess is cleaned up and I am sewn back together in the middle of the room, sucking on gas and air with my eyes resting on my daughter. I don’t care that they get the stitches wrong and have to do it again. My baby is in the corner and I am enjoying the high of licit drugs.

I am warned about the “baby blues” that can arrive five days into motherhood. I think the birth is the hardest thing I will ever do, so it will be fine. And then I experience the riptide of postpartum sleep deprivation. The nights are anarchic and I am bruised by fatigue. I’m breastfeeding 18 times a day, for an hour each time. “That’s wonderful,” I’m told, as I slip into nervous exhaustion.

“Just feed, feed, feed, feed, feed,” says the midwife. “Feed on demand,” says the literature. “You can’t overfeed a baby.” I don’t understand why she isn’t putting weight on when I am feeding incessantly. I am distraught that I’m unable to nourish my baby well enough.

Eventually, a kind, old, Irish midwife hears madness in my voice and gives me the permission I need to buy formula milk. The baby starts to grow and her jaundice recedes.

In those feverish weeks, I often sleepwalk into the living room cradling an imaginary baby. “She’s here, I have her,” says my husband, gently. Confused, I come to. Even when we are not in the same room, I think she is with me. I notice she has her own smell and I am surprised it is not the same as mine. When I close my eyes, I see her. I hallucinate her face in the wooden blinds, in the faces of the Queen, Dominic Cooper, Vince Vaughn, Yoda.

Some days I feel obliterated by the loss of agency. I am melting into her, and she into me. Hours morph into one another. The walls and days are porous and interchangeable.

Will I ever feel un-split again? I love my child, but I love my work, too. I’m vexed by the tension. I am surprised by the subliminal, contradictory messages I seem to have internalised, that a) modern motherhood is low-status drudgery that plucks a woman out of the “real world” and consigns her, voiceless, to the sidelines and b) mothers are selfish to go back to work (the “real world”) because it will harm the child (whether they can afford not to remains beside the point). I reject these facile, rubbish notions, but still wonder where they came from.

Physically, I am changed, too. I wince at myself in the mirror. I am someone else. My stomach is an empty cocoon, doughy and spent. My breasts are misshapen and scrawled with angry stretch marks. I have cut my hair short to save time washing it. My body smells earthier than normal because I don’t have time to bathe every day. And it is buttered with a layer of fat that waxes around my hips and thighs. I have thickened. “Matronly” might be the word for it. I resolve to buy scales instead of bagels.

Three months in, forged by the fourth trimester, I am learning to live with higher stakes, to bear the reality that she is vulnerable and nothing is certain. I am learning to enjoy the frightening enormity of this new love. Autumn is turning to winter; the world shrinks and brittles. More changes and evolutions will surely come but, for now, the waters feel calmer. We call her Evelyn. It means “longed-for child”.

This is an edited extract of Longed-For Child, which originally appeared on somesuchstories.co