Life
Taking Notes: Welcome to my Eden and thank you to Ezra
On the happy occasion of my granddaughter's birth, I couldn't have been more grateful to this wonderful charity
May 24, 2023 13:41
On the happy occasion of my granddaughter's birth, I couldn't have been more grateful to this wonderful charity
May 24, 2023 13:41Last weekend was a momentous one for our family. The day before she turned 27, and three weeks before her due date, my daughter Tamar brought her first baby into the world.
This made her a mother, her husband a father, me a grandmother, her father a saba, my mother a great-grandmother (good going, when you’re 75); and her three siblings, aunts and uncles; and the rest of us, of course, immensely happy.
My daughter’s in-laws were grandparents and aunts already. That doesn’t lessen their joy at this birth, of course, it’s just for us this is all entirely new. What’s more, it hasn’t been the most straightforward of gestations.
Little Eden (Photo: Handout)
There were health complications both early on and later in Tamar’s pregnancy, which meant that the birth itself carried terrifying risk. When Eden Ayala — as she was named in synagogue last Saturday — was born, the relief was enormous.
So enormous that it’s only in the last few days that I’ve realised how very nervous I’ve been these past eight months.
When they’ve experienced any sort of medical crisis, people always say how enormously grateful they are to the NHS, to the doctors and nurses and midwives who got them through it, and I now feel this gratitude in spades too. I wish these wonderful professionals were paid more and that their working conditions were better.
I have also realised these past days that when you are flooded with relief and gratitude, it’s hard to know what to do with those feelings. The impulse is to give back, to do something that puts that gratitude in motion. One way of doing that it to give to charity. And I know exactly where to donate,
Eden was born very early on Shabbat morning in North Manchester General Hospital which, rather wonderfully, has a Shabbos room. Openable with a push button code that you’d have to know Gematria to decipher, it looks like a tuck shop.
Emma with Eden (Photo: Handout)
