I gave up.
10 centimeters and 22 hours of labor into the birth of my third child, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to push that child out into the world. My image of myself as an experienced third-time mother and powerful birther of babies and all the memories of my second son's easy natural birth on the summer solstice four years earlier vanished, and I could not summon the mental strength to make my body do what it needed to do. The exhaustion of a long day's painful work that had begun in the dark hours of the previous morning buckled the knees of my spirit and I was left staring bewildered at my companions on this journey - my husband, the midwife, and the nurse. I had nothing left to give and yet somehow had to see this through to completion anyway.
I will always remember this moment as the first time in my life that I really had to acknowledge the limits of my own strength. Up until this point I fully believed that I could use my will to accomplish anything. The surrender of this belief was humbling.
I gave up.
But I was not alone. My husband saw it in my eyes, a thing he'd never seen in me before, and, though it scared him, he was able to help me to communicate. The midwife, when she finally understood what I was saying, assured me that if I rested, my body would continue the work of pushing, just slower than if I actively helped it. The doctors were there, too, to help me figure out what to do next, and to take the pain away enough so that I could regain my center and finish the work for me and my baby.
And most of all there was Isaac, before he even had his name. It was Isaac who worked with my muscles to push himself down while I took a moment to sleep and let the medication kick in. In the same moment that I acknowledged the limits of my own strength, Isaac came into his own and was an active participant in his own birth. My understanding of my own mortality met Isaac's will to be, and I knew that with his help I could go on. I pushed, and the midwife gasped as she saw Isaac's hand reach out beside his head, grasping forward, pulling himself into life.
Since that moment, I have been trying to accept my vulnerability and not fear the coming of my diminished capacities. The human paradox is that we are programmed to survive at the same time we designed to fall apart, and we live in the tension of those two truths. I learned, through Isaac's birth, that strength and determination are not qualities that I should try to hold onto permanently. These qualities exist in the collective and we borrow them as we need them. Sometimes, they do not even come to us directly, but appear in those around us, and we need to learn to lean into others to balance our weakness.
And when it is time to give up on an individual level, we must take comfort in the fact that strength endures beyond the fading of our light. We should never be surprised that a baby can be a savior.
(The amazing Charlotte Flowers blogs at http://thehometowntourist.blogspot.com/. Thank you Charlotte for sharing your story!)
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