DAY 15 - Train (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 15th instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

[trigger warning - birth story, description of pain in birth]
 

I had my first baby in a birth pool in my living room. It was long and slow but what was considered “straightforward” in technical terms. 

Up until the birth I’d worked hard to prepare, practised breathing and meditation techniques, listened to my audio relaxations every night, journalled, did my pregnancy yoga and all the things I thought I was supposed to do. Subconsciously this led to the assumption that I would have a large degree of influence over the birth. I thought the pain would be manageable and, although I was nervous and apprehensive, I felt a degree of confidence too. 

During the birth I was utterly overwhelmed by the intensity of the pain. It frightened me and threw me into a deep anxiety. Nothing I tried seemed to be successfully reducing it. In home births there’s no possibility of pain medication, and perhaps the removal of that as an option added to my anxiety. The thought occurred to me that I might die, and once I’d had the thought I couldn’t get it out of my head. I felt completely alone. 

Afterwards I felt shocked by the experience and also that I’d failed to master the mind-body marathon of birth. I hadn’t felt like the strong and powerful goddess I had so hoped I would.

Five and a half years later I gave birth to my son. Once again, I was blindsided by the pain. How the fuck could anything hurt like this and not kill you? But also, it didn’t feel like a malign pain. It was labour pain, enormous but with this kind of neutrality, an omnipotent goddess that shrugged her shoulders and kindly but but firmly said, get on with it. I didn’t try and fight her, I let her run through me like a train, juddering, shaking, remaking me. The moment the midwife handed me my baby boy was the most joyful of my life I couldn’t believe his face, how much of a human he was, how incomprehensible that I had grown him inside me. 

When I looked back at my first birth, I was stunned that someone who had laboured for 2 days with no sleep or pain relief could feel like a failure. By the second, my body didn’t believe that it was possible to get birth wrong. I hoped some of the things I’d practised would soothe and comfort me, but I wasn’t so attached to this outcome as a mark of success.

Moments of great intensity are always teachers. They say something about us - how and who we are, what we want and need - and something about the context we’re operating in. They can lay bare beliefs that no longer support us. When I think about anger and rage, when I have felt overwhelmed by these emotions, something else is going on or something that happened a long time ago has come to the fore. There's always a narrative that I can attempt to comprehend and tend to. There is always a next place to go.

I didn’t used to understand why it was so important to tell and retell your story. Now I know that new meaning is always brought to the technically same series of events. There’s always this possibility of birthing a fresh understanding, of holding something new in your hands.