musings

Violence and Glory. Ends and Beginnings.

(Whit at 38 weeks)

I can’t get Kelly’s post, Years That Ask and Years That Answer. Stories, Ends, Beginnings, Fire, Moon out of my head. 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.

This post is in honor of my friend whose due date with her first baby approaches. This is a magical moment. You are poised on the threshold of something so enormous and so dazzling that there are no words to describe it. No matter how you end up making the passage to motherhood, you will be irrevocably changed on the other side. You will have given birth. You will be expanded, empowered, enlarged, altered in ways that will reveal themselves gradually to you over time. I can’t wait to share the experience with you.

More Kelly

I am honored to again have my writing featured on Kelly Diels’ site, Cleavage. It is a high honor indeed to read my own sentences within the gilded cage of Kelly’s words. Hers is, in her own words, the “flesh poetry of experience.”

Kelly writes about art, religion, politics, philosophy, and Bratz dolls with equal adeptness. Her voice is, over and over again, a tour de force of bravado and brilliance, laced with self-deprecation and self-doubt. She is wildly impressive and deeply human. I am privileged to be writing on her site.

Please click over and read my piece about Why I Blog (Why I Write).

Slowing down

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me


That carol has been in my head this afternoon. It’s been the verbiage on my Christmas card more than once, and I still think it’s wise, wise advice. I am thinking now about what it means. What does it really imply to want to have peace begin with me.

And my mind keeps circling back to the same words: slow down

Slow down …

  • My reactions.
  • My defensiveness.
  • How quickly I physically move.
  • In responding to what someone says – I might understand better if I let it sink in. And I should stop interrupting which is just more of the same thing.
  • With my children – I rush them too much.
  • In acting on impulses. Just breathe and wait and see.

It feels natural this time of year, somehow, to slow down. The rhythm of the natural world has slowed, though there is the artificial frenzy leading up to the *h*o*l*i*d*a*y*s (!!! wide fake smile!!!). I am going to try to feel that slowness in my own body, to slow my responses, my reactions, my very breathing. The world is turning, very soon towards the sun again, and I need to slow down in order to trust that.

Those I love most deserve it. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

Am I a chameleon or an island? Or neither.

I’ve been thinking for the last couple of days about community, and belonging. Kristen’s post about whether certain perspectives are too familiar to push her to expand her thinking triggered it. Some of the comments, which referred to a community of bloggers who share a certain attitude about the world, made me think more.

I’ve spent my life feeling like I don’t really fit in anywhere. There are myriad places where I feel like I have one foot in the space, but nowhere I feel I really belong. I often have the sense of hovering around the perimeter of any group that I am with, of being a pale ghost floating over my own life, observing rather than participating. This no doubt contributes to my assumption of the role of photographer: some degree of remove helps in that position. At least with a camera in my hands there is something specific to do, a concrete task with which to busy myself so I don’t dwell on how awkward I feel.

I rarely feel comfortable to be fully myself, to reveal the deepest fears of my heart, to trust my affiliation with a group or even an individual. When I do find someone – and the truth is, there isn’t a group I can say this about, and only a tiny handful of people – with whom I can truly breathe and speak from my heart, the startled relief I feel can be overwhelming. I feel I am coming out of Plato’s cave, realizing that all of those other relationships and experiences were shadows, blinking my eyes in the dizzying, blinding sunlight. And then what follows is intense fear that this person, this key to a world of both glorious color and deep comfort, will leave me.

I’ve taken harsh, harsh criticism over the years for trying too hard to “fit in” to various groups. For being a chameleon who becomes what others want me to be. But what was – and still is – my alternative? To be lonely all of the time? I suppose I should be strong enough not to need or seek relationship or identification with a group or community. Yes, that is what I should be, but I’m just not. I am not an island. I wish I was. I wish I was confident and strong enough to not need a sense of belonging, but I’m not. Of course what I know now is that to be in a group and not feel engaged or fully present is actually more lonely than just being alone.

A desire to belong – to fit in – has haunted my entire life. I have ached, for years, to truly fit in somewhere. And I don’t. I guess I’m starting to accept that: I am perhaps too much of a kaleidoscope, too multi-faceted but also too fragmented, to really have a single place I “fit.” But it’s time for me to be gentler myself about this need, and to recognize it as a human impulse. Over the years I have emphasized certain things about myself and de-emphasized others in an effort to “pass,” and I’m mortified by some silly choices I may have made, but I haven’t ever done anything truly hurtful or amoral in this effort.

I suppose it’s all about recognizing, as Toni Morrison said, that “you are your own best thing.” If I could know that, maybe I’d long to belong a little less. Perhaps recognizing it is the first step. At least I hope so.

Similarity and Difference

I’ve had Kristen’s post called Validation in my head since I read it yesterday morning. Kristen asks herself (and us): “Do I simply search out people who reflect back to me what I want to see in myself? And, if so, is that a bad thing?” She goes on to talk about how she gravitates towards blogs whose general perspective feels familiar, and wonders if this reflects a “preference for a pot unstirred and waters untroubled.”

But I’ve been thinking more about this today, and about the comments, particularly that by BigLittleWolf. It was on my mind when I commented on Kristen’s post: I thought about blogs I read that are “different,” and realized that those that are the most different, the most off-topic, don’t really push my thinking about parenting or identity or presence or love or any of the big questions that roil my brain daily. Yes, I read a bunch of technology blogs, and also some superficial celebrity blogs. Both of these groupings I would call very different, in both topic and worldview, from my own blog. But that very difference opens up a gulf, and in that space the ability to influence my own thinking about my own thorniest personal issues is lost.

In my comment I defended what Kristen worries is a tendency towards validation as something more fundamental. I stand by my overall belief that those who feel “like us” in the blogosphere are probably much more legitimately “like us” than people we meet in real life. In a world where we are represented by words on a page a lot of the superficial identifiers that we use to sort through other people are removed. So when we resonate with another blogger we are, in large part, resonating with a very real and honest part of her. Not, for example, whether she has a kid at the same school or is wearing the same jeans we are.

And so what I’m mulling over now is that in order to really expand our horizons about topics like mothering, does a blog (or a person, or a point of view) require a baseline degree of familiarity? If something is too foreign, don’t we all instinctively dismiss it, some psychological version of graft-versus-host disease? I agree with BLW, in fact, that while there are some similarities in theme and tone among the blogs that I read most passionately and loyally, they are hardly identical. I am sure that those of us who blog about parenting, for example, actually differ quite widely in the ways in which we mother. I’m sure we have different points of view on bedtimes and food and time-outs and appropriate behavior. And none of us is right, by the way. The learning comes from hearing other people talk about why, and how they think about it.

At least for me. I think the most valuable conversations – be they in person or in the blogosphere – are often (not always) with people who are relate-able enough that their view is credible to us, their input valued because we know we respect their opinion and perspective. Of course this respect is earned multiple ways, and similarity to ourselves is neither the only way nor a guarantee of it. The people whose input I esteem the most highly in this world are not all like me; they are not all mothers, not all women, not all like me. They are, universally, intelligent, thoughtful, caring, and deeply engaged in the business of living.

And this is what I look for in blogs I love – in fact in all media that I consume. I am drawn to people whose outlook on the world makes me think, people who are able to spin words into a dazzling gossamer web, people who are honest about their struggles and challenges and weaknesses. I think that having this, ultimately, is the similarity of which Kristen speaks: the willingness to share candid stories, to actively engage in the effort to live more thoughtfully and consciously, and to admit difficulty. If that’s what the blogs I love best have in common, then I can only aspire to call myself similar to that. That’s a community of “sameness” that I would be proud to be a part of.