Approaching The Mystery
I am trying to give myself much more grace in this late pregnancy state than I normally am able to. My due date has come and gone. I am moving slow. Really slow. My kids are late to summer camp every day. I can’t seem to get out of bed before 8am no matter how the night went. Small tasks that usually I can complete in a flash, somehow take double, triple the amount of time thus throwing all of my time estimates way off. I’m officially in whale mode. Wide turns. Cosmic space. Soft bosom, squishy everything, the milky way.
I remember with my last two babies, appreciating the divinity of the design here: we aren’t supposed to be move fast right now. We need to be slowed all the way down to be able to meet our babies with presence. With patience. With soft tenderness. We are tenderized to the bone. I’ve never felt so raw, so freshly skinned as I have after both of my babies were born. And now again, as I enter the portal a third time, I can feel that quality of rawness return. It’s uncomfortable. I tear up when I see roadkill, I wince hearing of others’ struggles, especially physical or medical ones, my heart leaps for baby animals, struggling insects, I am more easily duped by my children’s fake cries. Matrescence in full form. It’s a thinning of the veils. The womb room. It’s the life and death portal. Hopefully life, but it is simply the other side of the same coin. I have boiled all of my birth fear down to that: the fear of death.
Although we are not living in the early 1800s anymore when one in every one hundred to two hundred women would die giving birth, we are still flirting with death, each time we give birth. And wow, there is potency to that. Many would argue this is not what a forty week pregnant woman should be contemplating, nor anyone on the pregnancy journey, however there has been something irresistibly compelling to me about facing these truths. And I have found myself time and time again, on a mission for truth about birth.
Along the way I have discovered so much miseducation in the mainstream on risk factors, alternative options, medications, the list goes on. While I won’t get into all that at the moment, it feels only appropriate to honor the fear that I have in this moment and the fear that many women have as they approach the birth portal—whether it is about actually physically dying, or about a part of ourselves dying. I don’t think we can have a birth of any kind (be it a human or a business starting, or a new chapter in our lives unfolding) without death. As something is born, something else dies. This is part of the life cycle. Moving. Divorce. Starting a new job. Starting at a new school. All of these circumstances carry with them death and birth. As the butterfly emerges from the cocoon, the caterpillar is no longer. However we take with us pieces of our old selves, just as the butterfly carries with it imaginal discs with information from it’s life as a caterpillar into it’s new winged form. Yet we are never the same. There is no going “back”. There is no “getting your body back”.
This is especially true in the transition from no kids to a mother’s first child. A whole new identity emerges. And with it a new lifestyle. With new limitations and horizons. New people, new experiences, a completely reconstructed reality. This is no joke. Matrescence, the process of becoming a mother, is the largest transformation on every level (physical, spiritual, cognitive, social, emotional, and shall we throw in wardrobe?!) than at any other point in a human’s life, other than possibly adolescence and puberty - however I would argue that adolescence comes with less complete lifestyle changes. Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, speaks to this beautifully in her book, which is a must-read for every person who is a mom, has a mom, or wants to be a mom - so basically, everyone.
What I want for women everywhere, and for myself in this portal moment as I approach birth, is to feel empowered to do what feels right. Whatever birth plan you can feel in your bones in right for you—do that. Whether it’s a planned C-Section or a natural home birth with twenty friends and family in the room singing your baby out, trust it. Trust it with every fiber of your being, and simultaneously, be ready to change that plan at any moment to go with the next plan that is unfolding and feels right. Be attached to nothing except for your health and the baby’s health. Let everything else go. Your self-consciousness. Your ideas of what you thought it could, should, or would look like. Let the wild primal animal in you lead. Surrender completely and have advocates prepped by you in advance that you trust so that they can support your surrender if it becomes challenging to do so.
Open to the mystery. Open, open, open. And then open more. Give yourself over to the forces greater than you, that inhabit you, to birth the baby however she is meant to make her grand entrance. You are not actually in control.
The approach to birth is an approach to The Great Mystery, which is actually what we are all up to in life all the time, anyways. We are just often walking around in the the illusion that we know what’s going to happen and when. So, in some ways, the on ramp to birth feels more honest than any other state of being I have ever known.
