Birth Pains

I'm officially a mother! My son came into the world late at night on September 29. He is absolutely beautiful! It's hard to describe what it's like to become a parent for the first time, to be around new life that is this fresh… I'm finding it difficult to reflect on my experience, I suppose because I'm so immersed in it. It's hard to get the distance required to comprehend what's really happening. I have what they call "baby brain"; I am functioning out of my body mostly - and I have felt that I'm constantly pouring my body out for this child. This is my life right now - a vessel focused solely on his proper nurturing and growth; this is the essence of my love right now – physical and raw, pouring myself out through my milk.

My son has a beautiful swirl on the top of his forehead – marked in the soft fuzz of the beginnings of his hair. It reminds me of the great red spot on Jupiter, the enormous storm that has been raging on that planet for at least 400 years. I tell the baby that he came into the world with the storm of Jupiter, as his birth ended up being quite a dramatic event.

My water broke early, and because of the risk of infection, my healthcare providers have a policy to induce labor if a mother doesn't spontaneously go into labor within a given time of her water breaking. My husband and I tried everything we could think of and more to induce labor without drugs – walking, nipple stimulation, prayer and driving to an acupuncture clinic for treatment meant to induce active labor. The midwives let us wait as long as they could, and I did go into labor, but progress was so slow that we finally gave into the strong recommendations of the midwives that we chemically induce.

I won't go into detail about the following 20 hours or so – needless to say, they were excruciatingly painful and exhausting – active labor. I finally reached full dilation, and the midwives, doula, and my husband could see the baby's head. I pushed for 3 hours. I can honestly say that I used up every last ounce of energy I had. I have never in all my life worked so hard for something. I danced on the knife-edge between conscious and unconscious worlds as I desperately tried to pass this baby all the way out from me with my own strength. He was face-up, and his head was cocked to one side. Specialists in turning babies were brought in. They coached me and tried to get his head straightened so he could pass underneath my pubic bone – but he wouldn't budge.

So I had a c-section. Lying on the operating table, exhausted beyond measure, paralyzed from the chest down, and again teetering on the edge of consciousness, I felt utterly helpless. The scene before me faded in and out of view. I tried to focus on my husband's eyes peering out, concerned, from above his mask, for reassurance. I felt, as the doctors cut me open and brought my son into the world under those harsh lights, that I was lying in the pit of hell.

The doctor who delivered my son found him positioned with his foot stuck up under his chin (which explains why his head was cocked and the need for the c-section) – she said she'd never seen that before in all her years of practicing. As I met my beautiful son, I struggled to stay conscious. I struggled to comprehend what was happening as I kissed his face fresh from my body. I felt lost and disconnected and struggled to recognize this person as the one I had grown and held and nurtured in my body for the last 9 months.

This story is so traumatic that I can hardly bear it. There is so much pain and disappointment to grapple with! The days recovering in the hospital following the birth were equally as dark. They dragged on, and I struggled to comprehend what was happening. It felt as if I had been thrust into a different realm of the universe, suddenly, and I was grasping in complete darkness to orient myself. It was as if, when I was split open, so was the space-time continuum and that there was a complete disconnect between worlds.

As the pain meds faded, and my mind gradually came back into focus, I was left with a lot of questions and immense grief that it takes courage to face in the midst of the joy surrounding me from family and friends. How could I cope with how my son's life had begun, and with how my journey as a mother had begun? How could I accept what had happened as real, with any kind of strength or grace? How could I go on in the visceral way I had to, as this child was depending on me for his very survival? How could I look into his bright and hopeful eyes and face my own feelings of loss, helplessness, and failure, as he looked to me for his own sense of orientation and reassurance?

Early in my pregnancy, I experienced some dark moods and was talking to a friend about it. I mentioned that I worried that my depression was affecting the baby's experience as he was taking shape, and he said “And vice versa. You're probably feeling what the baby's experiencing as well”. That concept blew my mind, and throughout the pregnancy, I continued to think of mine and the baby's journeys as intertwined, neither more dominant than the other – inextricably linked and directed by the complex and mysterious combination of combined destiny and will, both mine and his. It consoles and encourages me to think that, despite my not being fully “there” for my son's birth, perhaps we were more bonded than I felt at the time, by the fact that we were probably experiencing the birth very similarly. I can imagine that, for him, the feeling of being transported into another realm was felt quite literally. For him, the veil that had always sheltered him from the world to come was ripped away suddenly, and he had no idea what was behind it. He and I both were thrust into a new place, disoriented by bright lights, masked realities, exploded expectations, and stunning pain. We went to the place where life begins and ends together, to the River Styx, and we crossed it. We went there, holding hands, both in the thick of it, primally, not able to comprehend what was happening as it happened – there being only room for feeling, and none whatsoever for reflective thinking. Raw fear, searing pain, hard work, and the fire of transformation consumed us and devoured us, spitting us out upon the shore of the other side. If that's not bonding, then I don't know what is. I don't know if mothers often experience the birth of their children this way – perhaps some of the excruciating pain is there by design, perhaps we all go to the place where life begins and ends as mothers in order to retrieve our children - but I suppose it's not my place to question that. I've learned that something as primal, deep, and intimate as childbirth is like nothing else, and, similarly to birth, sex, or death, a person's experience with it is uniquely expressed in that person's soul and cannot be adequately explained or described.

This birth experience has taught me (as so much of the pain in life has) about acceptance, or as a Jain or Buddhist might call it, non-attachment. Ultimately, I've now realized, this birth story is not about me. As I alluded to in my blog entry about motherhood (which I wrote while pregnant), I was simply the vessel through which my son entered the world. This is my story in some sense, but it's also his, and, more wholly, this story is God's. I have been reminded that although my life is “mine” to choose how to live, my life is not mine alone. I am not only a vessel for my child, but, more than anything else, a vessel for God to act in the world. I live because God gives me breath. I live because God placed me in this life. I have a calling, and it is by God's grace alone that I can live it. The best I can hope for in this life is that I can find that “vein of gold” that allows me to live in the way that God would have me live, to learn the lessons that will shape me into the Self that God wants me to be, to find deep and ultimate fulfillment in that. In that spirit, frankly, I will not always get what I “want” in life. Sometimes, I simply have to accept, accept, accept things that are difficult, and allow God to write my story, no matter how painful. To live in the story He gives me with a spirit of non-attachment, a spirit that is able to live into it while transcending it; to feel it deeply but also to feel the stillness that is God at the center of it. I've been counting my blessings instead of focusing on the loss of the ideal, or the loss of what I wanted for this birth. Thank God for my healthy boy. Thank God that I made it through this delivery alive, and that I will recover (many women in the developing world cannot hope for the same). I get to continue to live and learn and grow through this life! What a blessing.

The most poignant part of this story, for me, is the date that my baby came into the world - September 29, 2010. This date is exactly 10 years after my other most transformative experience in life occurred, when I first enjoyed a mystical communion with God, “accepting Christ into my heart”. I wrote in my journal on Sept 29, 2000, “I experienced the effects of the Holy Spirit for the first time today...” It is remarkable that this baby chose to come into the world early and chose this exact special day (or that God chose it, or that I subconsciously chose it – or all of the above). I do not know what it means, but it speaks to me of profound themes, such as the tension between the ideal and the fallen, the hoped for and the settled for, and how the spirit of Christ represents the choice to live in that tension for me. Christ, arms spread on the cross - on one side the criminal who joins him in heaven, and the other, the one who goes to hell - is the reconciliation of heaven and earth, of the spiritual and the material, of God and humanity. He is the middle path, and it is this path, I believe, that allows us the friction required to move the Earth forward along its journey of transformation towards a state of heaven. “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven”. The middle path is not a path of the ideal. It is a path fraught with very real dangers; it is a path through the narrows. The Bible says “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13-14, New International Version). It is a path of constriction and the pain of transformation. This path is the path of humanity, and humanity alone. We are the beings in this universe who alone have the power of self-reflective consciousness, and it is we who are thus tasked with the deliberate transformation of the world. I think here of birth and human (imperfect, overly-mechanized) intervention versus the ideally-experienced“natural way”, and how my baby's birth walked the line between these ways. I so longed for the natural way. I so longed for the ideal. I left no room in my mind for anything other than that. But when my water broke on Sept 26, a chain of events was set in motion that reminded me indelibly that I don't live in an ideal world, and that neither will my son. That we are tasked with walking this middle path between spirit and flesh, “carrying our crosses”throughout our lives.

I remember that early on in labor after all other alternatives had been considered, I finally consented to the first intervention in the birth. It was a pill I had to take that would soften my cervix to make it ready to deliver. As I dropped the pill into my mouth, I sighed to the midwife and my husband and said, sarcastically, “the bitter pill of compromise”. This poignant phrase pretty much sums up the entire experience for me. It is a deep cosmic compromise to live somewhere between the ideal and the purely broken. Yet there is something so tragically beautiful about this compromise, something that feels grounded and real, earthy and so... human. With this reflection, then, I will “take up my cross” and accept this experience for what it has been, for myself, my husband, and my son, thank God that He exists, thank God that I exist, lift my eyes towards heaven, and continue walking this rocky path.