What natural birth taught me about death
There is nothing that has made me feel better about my body than natural birth.
Nothing has empowered me more as a woman.
Nothing else in my life came so naturally & instinctively and yet required such an all consuming physical and mental struggle.
And— there is probably no drug on earth that could have topped the high I felt when I pulled him to my chest for the first time. The moment he was born, I knew two things at once:
That I had done something incredibly hard and that there was literally nothing I couldn’t accomplish now.
That no one else would ever feel for him what I had. I was “mother” in every meaning of the word.
There was no better way to kickstart my motherhood journey than by bringing my child into it naturally.
That’s why I’m loud about natural birth. Because I found pieces of myself in the valleys and mountains & picked up pieces of strength and confidence and resilience in the fire. Because I deeply feel that women were designed to feel this. I believe that natural birth will take you by the hand and teach you a great many things about life and it will change your life forever.
I didn’t realize how much I would need the what I felt and learned in natural birth to face the challenges in motherhood that came after birth. Epilepsy— medically advocating— trusting my instincts. And something I couldn’t have anticipated— how natural birth prepared me for death.
Next month, we will mourn the second anniversary of Kalea’s death and five days later celebrate Payson’s 4th birthday.
The anniversary of her death and his birth in the same week.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as anticipatory grief starts to settle on my shoulders and I begin to feel those early pangs of another anniversary.
And then I remember what I learned in natural birth (and what has carried me through almost two years of grief)—
The pain doesn’t last forever— contractions (and grief) come in waves. There will be time to rest. Your body will not naturally push you beyond your limits. Strength has got nothing to do with it. Soften, soften, open, open. You don’t get to “tough” your way through birth (or death)— you soften into it. Relax into the pain and work with your body. Slip into surrender. There is purpose and peace here working with the pain. Pain precedes life. You can do hard things, you were born to do this.
And I remember that this is a process. I can’t skip it. But I can embrace it. And the more I do— the more I allow myself to feel— the softer I become and in that softness I find strength. I find what it means to be woman.
Giving birth has nothing to do with strength. Grief has nothing to do with strength either. And losing a child does not make you “strong”. It makes you soft. It makes you tender. And it is a BLESSING to navigate life with that tenderness & softness. And it is every bit as transformative as birth.
Birth and death work together. They are the most natural things in the world— maybe the only real things we have left. I have faced both— and I have learned (perfectly summed up in the words of Ina May Gaskin) “The creator is not a careless mechanic.”
Birth, death, and everything in between is why you are here. For all the pain and hard stuff in this world there is not a soul alive who isn’t wonderfully and beautifully designed to bear it.
You can do it.
You were born to do it.
