Unimaginably Hard, Inexpressibly Beautiful

“I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you.”

 -Dr. Brene Brown

The other day I was at a birth… my client had decided to get an epidural and I was sent out of the room while the anesthesiologist placed it in her spine.  I sat in one of two chairs in the center of the labor and delivery wing, and a strange woman who had been haunting the hallways for the past four hours plopped down beside me.  She informed me that she was waiting for her surrogate to have her baby, a moment she had been waiting for her entire life.  She was wringing her hands, her anxiety palpable.

“Are you a mom?”  she asked.

“Three little girls,”  I said, smiling warmly, I tried to surround her in my calm energy, bring down her distress with my own breath.

“Is it hard?”  she asked a few quiet minutes later.

“Labor?”

“No, being a mom.”

I squeezed her quaking hand.  I told her it was hard.  And marvelous.

“How?  How is it hard?”  she persisted, trying to gather her motherhood in her arms so she could greet her new babe with all of the secrets in hand.

I was called in to my client again before I could give her an answer.

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Open Me

rumi-quote

Birth is a powerful force, uncontrollable and raw.  It brings us into our most primitive, simple forms.  The design of our bodies, the synchronicity of our composition.  It is a compact, intense and potent experience…our whole life collapsed into a single moment.  The moment we become.

Become a living, breathing expression of our soul.

Become a mother, the soul inexplicably and forever tethered to another in the most cosmic and physical sense.

 

I have spent many years searching for the latent and omnipotent meaning behind this soul-altering experience.   I have also been searching for something.   A lost part of my spirit.A way to turn ON the dead parts of me that I have shut off and let die.

I have been aching to define it, give it words, give it LIFE…give birth to this need for the something I can’t even outline.

 

Recently, I have been drawn into working as a doula… a woman who is hired to support a mother during labor and birth.  I have moved into this work with a powerful sense of purpose…there is something here for me to learn.

 

To see.

 

To experience.

 

I need to be here, doing this.

 

Getting into the work has been exhausting.  Emotionally and physically draining, and challenging my patience and communication skills constantly.  I teeter on the edge of quitting, turning tail and running, cutting the stress and expectation and difficult  relationships loose and being freed from it all.  But I stay.  Because there is something here, in this work.

 

Something that I am meant to do.

 

What is it?  What is birth meant to teach me? Continue reading