musings

I read Elizabeth at Life in Pencil’s post, Birth Plans, Life Plans, with interest yesterday. I think her acknowledgement of the ways that birth plans are an attempt to feel control in a fundamentally uncontrollable situation is wise. She writes that the birth plan “…helps me to battle the ambiguous vagaries of birth and provide an illusion of control, especially in a situation riddled with uncertainty,” demonstrating more wisdom than many pregnant women, some of whom don’t realize that even with the world’s most carefully thought out and articulated birth plan, these vagaries and uncertainties will ultimately rule the day.

Elizabeth’s post, beautifully written as usual, made me think all day. I’ve been writing so much lately about endings and beginnings, and surely the births of my children were the most essential moments of ending and beginning, knit inextricably together, in my life. Of course the beginning part of a birth is obvious, and celebrated. The fact that an undeniable ending is cached within this lauded beginning is less acknowledged but, I believe, equally important.

I wrote about this complex amalgam of emotions, particularly during my actual births, last year. It’s been on my mind, so I repost it here. Thank you, Elizabeth, for the thought-provoking and inspirational post.

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I can’t stop thinking about Kelly Diels’ post, Years That Ask and Years That Answer. Stories, Ends, Beginnings, Fire, Moon. I cannot get her voice out of my head, the images and tropes that are some of my own most favorite (years that ask questions, Bertha, Eve, seasons, cycles). I keep hearing, over and over again, this phrase: the flesh poetry of experience.

A secret language traded between intimates of the violence of birth and glory of delivery. The wrenching of asunder and the joy of embrace. A story beaten in the pulse of mundane responsibility and cosmic love. Goddesses and bitches and sisters and women. We know this story. It is the story of generation.

This paragraph makes me think of the births of my two babies. Of the violence and glory of their deliveries. Two of my most cherished life experiences. I still struggle to put into words what those nights were like. They were not just moments of my life that I recall with stunning, crystalline detail. They were also passages from one world to another, and somehow in the passage I was able to glimpse through the seam of this reality to something bigger and more breathtaking. What I saw and sensed changed me forever.

Even seeing the photograph above brings tears to my eyes. It is almost impossible to remember being swollen like that with life, to remember the feeling of feet in my ribs and of seeing the spine as a glowing string of pearls on a flickering ultrasound screen. I look at the picture as tangible proof, but when I search for the correlated sense memories they are weak.

What is more miraculous than the female body’s ability to create and bear life? Seriously, what? We take it for granted, in many ways, and perhaps we have to because otherwise the blinding truth of it would be too much to bear.

Grace’s birth was the story of resistance. It was about my gritting my teeth and stubbornly laying in for the stay. Part of the resistance was that she was posterior, but it was also about my own fears, anxieties, and utter lack of preparation to be a mother. I was in battle against myself, I know that now: I was holding on, not ready to embrace a new life (mine, not hers) and identity. I was not ready to face the end of a phase of my life, the multiple deaths that are contained in birth. The inexorable force of a baby descending the birth canal went to war against my own quite powerful subconscious, and I was in labor for over 36 hours, at 9+ centimeters for 3 hours.

I cried and I screamed and I begged to be put out of my misery: I distinctly recall telling my midwife, completely seriously, that I’d like her to put a bullet in my head and just cut the baby out. The pain was both incendiary and incandescent. It was a crucible through which I had to pass, the heat so extreme that I was rendered molten. It was an animal experience, a raw, passionate, and terrifying introduction to a ferocity I had never imagined I possessed.

I delivered Grace myself. At my midwife’s instruction, I reached down and put my thumbs under her armpits when she was half born and pulled her onto my own chest. I am more grateful than I can express for photographs of this moment. Little did I know I had months of darkness ahead of me before the grace that I had just brought into my life would be made manifest.

Whit’s birth was the story of acceptance and surrender. It was as I imagined birth would be. I labored alone for an hour or two at home, reading Ina May and swaying back and forth with the contractions. It was late at night, Grace slept in her new bedroom next door, and Matt was at work. I labored alone and felt undeniably in the presence of something much larger than myself. I felt a surpassing peace that somehow did not surprise me in the least. I was not afraid of what I imagined was another 24 hours of labor.

After 3 short hours of labor Matt insisted that we go to the hospital. I fought him tooth and nail but finally, after running to crouch on the dining room floor to muffle my screams in the rug (so as not to scare Grace, who was being picked up by my mother), I conceded. Whit was born 40 minutes after I walked in the doors of the hospital. The experience of pushing Whit out was nothing short of transformational. In the moment I was afraid of the intensity and the searing pain, but in retrospect I can see that my entire body reformed itself in those minutes, making itself into a channel for him to come through, a passageway between a murky and unknown place and this brightly-lit world.

The truth is, I don’t often feel an overwhelming sense of this-is-what-I-am-here-for about mothering. But during my two labors there was a keen and irrefutable drumbeat of certainty: this – delivering – is what my body was made to do. There’s no question in my mind that a barn burned down while I labored with Grace. Sometimes I think of the depression that swamped me almost immediately after her arrival as the time it took for me to sort through the ashes, to make sense of this new landscape. And yes, from here I can see that even in those dark days there was a clear moon, that truths were washed clean by icy white light.

I love this post by Meg Casey, The girl with the bowl in her lap. In the eloquent, wise, beautiful language I now know to expect from Meg, she writes about a meditation she has been using lately. “I imagine myself,” she writes, “climbing up on top of my mountain and sitting peacefully with a bowl in my lap. And I imagine that everything I need to know, or find, or discover will appear in my bowl unbidden.” She then goes on to describe about how this fundamentally passive and trusting philosophy runs counter to everything she’s always thought about how to pursue a dream.

This post has been rising and falling in my head for several days. For two reasons. One, because I have a strong sense that what I need to do now is precisely what Meg talks about, which is to say surrender, rest, and trust. I’m not good at these things. Not good at all. I’m much better at muscling my way through something. My default mode is effort, sometimes to the point of forcing. I know intellectually it’s time to wait and to believe. I even know this in my heart. But I still don’t quite know how. So I’m fumbling my way towards that knowledge in the dark, startling myself with the noises I make when I knock something over and bumping into things at every turn. It’s awkward, but I don’t know how else to proceed.

The other way I’ve been feeling Meg’s words is in the image of a bowl. I feel like a bowl right now myself. Specifically, like the small cherry wood salad bowl my godmother gave me for my wedding 10 years ago. I feel intermittently completely empty and full to bursting. The levels – of what? I’m not sure exactly – inside of me rise and fall as inexorably as tides though without a similar regularity and rhythm. When I’m full sometimes I feel like I splash messily over my sides because I’m not on a steady or flat surface. When I’m empty I feel absolutely barren, wrung out, exhausted in a bone-deep way. When I hear Meg’s voice it tells me to just wait, to know that a time of more equilibrium is coming. And I’m back in the darkness, hands outstretched, all the senses other than sight pricked to high awareness, feeling my way home. But this is a new and unfamiliar home, the one that calls me now.

My mother is afraid of heights. I have many memories of Hilary, Dad, and I climbing to the top of a cathedral or spire in a European city, and looking down from the top to see my mother’s small form waving up at us. I might be turning into her, as I’ve been feeling woozy when at a height lately. I’m feeling the beginnings of vertigo. And not just the vertigo of identification I get when I look into Gracie’s eyes.

I have written before about the sensation of feeling insubstantial: it comes to me most often when I’m crossing the Charles River on a run on a windy day. I feel like my connection to the physical earth is tenuous, like I might be simply swept away. I’ve felt that way a fair bit lately, but it hasn’t been windy.

Over Memorial Day we were in New Hampshire with dear friends. On Saturday morning we climbed through a gorge called Lost River. We’ve done this before. The area has an elaborate system of wooden bridges and ramps and you climb through the rocky gorge. There are a series of caverns you can walk through, though I don’t, because they scare me. For the first time, I had several moments of dizziness as I walked up and down the steep wooden stairways, or looked over into a gorge. I’ve felt this way in passing before, but never for extended periods of time like that morning.

And recently Grace and I were swinging next to each other at a playground near our house. At the top of each arc, I felt my stomach hop slightly, almost as though it was catching its breath, traveling a parabolic arc. I felt something turning over deep inside of me, some fundamental unease that echoed the vertigo I felt at Lost River.

It strikes me that both sensations are manifestations of the same basic lack of connection to the earth I’ve described before. It’s almost as though gravity’s hold on me is loosening, as though my footing on the earth is simply not stable. I suspect this may have something to do with the earthquake rumbling through my soul. I don’t know exactly why now, or when it will end, but I know I like it better when east and west are where I expect them, when up and down stay where they should be. I am deeply uncomfortable when the basic corners of my physical place in the world seem fluid rather than fixed.

(heart-shaped fern, this weekend. i’m sure i would not have noticed this in previous years)

I’m happy to participate in Dian Reid‘s marvelous Self-Evidence and Authenticity Challenge. I encourage you all to visit Dian’s blog and read some of her thoughtful, honest, resonant words. I read them all and learn something in every post.

In an uncharacteristic display of either randomness or inspiration (you decide), I am going to start not at the top of the list (with Compassion), but with Intention. Intention. I like intention better than goal, personally, because it implies an internal rather than external focus. Intention doesn’t share the forced-forward-motion feeling of words like drive, either.

But, really, what is my intention? I am clearly in the middle of my life. These are the rich days of adulthood, the long hours and short years of parenting small children, a time I am certain I will look back on with nostalgia. As Dani Shapiro so beautifully describes in her gorgeous memoir, Devotion, I feel as though it’s taken me a long time to clack, slowly, to the top of the roller coaster ramp, but I know that from here it’s going to go breathtakingly fast. I am increasingly aware of intention, and it feels like it matters more. This feels like a weighty and important question: what is my intention? For now, for today, for tomorrow, for the rest of my life?

The best answer I can give is that my intention is to live inside this life of mine. To accept that the truth of my current life is summed up in three words: “I don’t know.” To embrace the unknown which seems to press against the sides of my days, making itself known at unexpected moments with surprising urgency. The unknown which has flooded in to fill the void that I discovered when I let go of the illusion of certainty. I’ve spent my life following a map, you see, and in my early 30s I realized it was no longer helping me find my way. I had moved into a territory past the border of the map, and I felt lost. Into this sensation of being lost came an overwhelming awareness of the echoing “I don’t know.”

I am learning, slowly and haltingly, that there is no need for a map after all. There isn’t anywhere to go. In truth, it was only once I took my eyes off the horizon and my attention away from the next accomplishment that I started seeing what was right here. I’d spent 30 or more years tripping over the brush in my tracks, totally focused on the next place I was going. I ache to think what gems and surprises I missed.

So I guess that is my intention. To honor the not-known, the unknown, and the I don’t know. To respect that maybe feeling lost is the only way to be found. To give myself the room to learn how to live in a way that is not about the next thing, but about this right here. To take the time to learn how to navigate this land without maps.