Many of you know that birth is an important topic to me personally. Let me say that again: to me personally. I do not consider myself an evangelist and hope to never come across as one. It has struck me more than once that it’s interesting that the universe made the process of becoming a mother (conception, pregnancy, birth) so easy for someone who struggles so mightily with being a mother.
Anyway, I read this passage today on babble.com and it captures a lot of what I feel about birth – an open mind rather than a closed one, in fact, and a powerful awareness of my own luck in having it go the way it did for me. It is an important passage, certainly, but in the grand scheme of identity and motherhood, a very small one. And, arguably, you make the passage one way or another. It is the arrival on the other side that is the key, no?
The lesson, ultimately, is that we are not in control; this is a conversation I’ve had many times over with friends waiting at 41 weeks for their first child to commence his or her arrival. We are simply not in charge of these little people: not then, and not ever. I may have handled relatively easily the intense hours of becoming a mother that the writer describes, but I grapple on a regular basis with the months, years, and decades of mothering. There is no ambiguity in my mind about which struggle is more important, more meaningful, and more difficult.
Was it the birth of my dreams? Hardly. Do I wish it could have been different? Sure. But compared with the result — my daughter, Liana, little sister to my sons Eitan and Daniel — I really don’t care. If I’ve learned anything in ten years of motherhood, it’s that the way our children are brought into the world means very little for how they live in the world. Nor do the intense hours in which we become mothers shape the months, years and decades of our actually being mothers. And if the experience of childbirth is in fact a crucial process, then let it be the process of teaching us that our children will emerge in ways varied and complicated, not necessarily in times or manners of our choosing, neither made in our image nor as proof of our prowess. Let birth remind us that, with children, so little goes according to even the most well-drawn plan.
– Tova Mirvis