What We Found | Fillie

To be a Family III

The analog clock on the warm sienna tinged wall of the luxury recovery suite reads three o'clock, but Millie feels like she's in a timeless vortex consisting of only her, her boyfriend, and their hour-and-a-half old baby, Poppy.

Millie, Finn and their precious, sleeping daughter are all snuggled together in an unexpectedly comfortable, oversized hospital bed, the head of which is raised so Millie and Finn are sitting upright but slightly reclined because her recovering body desperately requires the angle. Finn's left arm is wrapped behind Millie's neck and crosses the top of her chest allowing him to hold the shoulder that is leaning into him. She holds his forearm with one hand like a pull-up bar while the other rests, along with Finn's free hand, on their baby who is sleeping restfully, swaddled in a standard issue hospital blanket and nestled in a pillow that lays across both parents' outstretched legs.

The recovery room is big, serene, and so nice that Millie keeps forgetting she's in a hospital. It doesn't even smell like a hospital either. The young mother's nostrils are filled with a soothing blend of her boyfriend's coffee on the table next to the bed and what smells like a lit balsam and cedar candle. The mingling scents along with the dimmed ambient lighting and the shades pulled down over the massive windows, blocking out the mid-afternoon winter sun, evokes a calmness that adds to the memory the actress is actively making in her mind right now.

Her eyes are tired but she can't take them off her daughter's face. She studies the precious, round, red-mottled face like she's trying to commit every smooth inch, every soft hair, and every twitch of her sleepy cheek to memory.

Like when she first saw Oliver the night she and Finn reconciled, she can't get enough of the intricacies of her child's face. All the distinctive bits of her and Finn that perfectly melded together to make a brand-new, exquisitely unique creation. She simply can't stop staring at her.

From the moment Poppy was placed on her chest till now, Millie's eyes haven't wandered from her daughter for more than five seconds. That first moment, though, is cemented in her mind like the miracle that it was.

Millie had thought she was going to pass out. She'd wanted an epidural but things had escalated so quickly that she was told it was too late and she would have to go without one. She was only four pushes into what she thought would be a long birthing process and she wanted so badly to take a break, to let up and hold for the next contraction, when suddenly she felt a swell of pressure from deep within her, forcing her to push harder somehow.

After an impalpable moment where she felt like her head was under water, unable to hear, see, or speak, clarity suddenly broke through with her daughter's first wails. The full-lunged cries returned Millie's inundated mind to her physical brain.

It was like coming out of a wormhole of dark pressure into a rich, bright paradise. Her senses flooded back and the pain seemed to completely wash away with the sound of her daughter's vocal chords filling the room.

The profound relief she had felt in that moment was life-changing. It felt like everything in her life up to this point was just part of the back story that led to this moment and she couldn't have been happier.

Tears had erupted from her eyes into the sweat that was already dampening her face and body. She couldn't help feeling like she had just achieved something so much more remarkable than anything she had accomplished in life thus far. Every award, every achievement, everything she was ever proud of was now horribly pale in comparison to what she just did. She felt like Wonder Woman. Like a glowing amazonian warrior goddess with power emanating from her very core into the world around her.

She could hear Finn freaking out and her mother blubbering something in her ear but all the sounds and commotion faded into the background of Millie's awareness that was solely focused on her daughters trembling chin as the little baby filled her tiny lungs with air for the first time, crying with such force that she was assured her daughter was as healthy as a newborn could be.