The Impermanence of Waves
...and the Wisdom of Contractions
It’s Spring (hoorah!!!) and my favorite sign of the season is always my daughter’s birthday. Born on the equinox 18 years ago, last month’s birthday was a milestone, for sure. These kinds of threshold crossings bend time, and I’ve been awash in glad reminiscing these last few weeks. There I am standing in the kitchen, suddenly overtaken by the vanilla scent of her baby hair. Or rendered mute in the garden, recalling the soft tug of her dimpled toddler hand. Or blinking into the reading light, remembering the full, surrendered weight of her beside me as we paged through another stack of library books.
Further back, there is the body memory of carrying her. How I loved being pregnant! The ambrosia of those hormones. The joyous heft and utility of that temporary body. I think being pregnant was the first time I couldn’t plausibly deny having one. A body, I mean. But it wasn’t just mine anymore. How thrilling! How weird! I remember lying awake in the dark, my hand poised on my belly button as a rabbit-like fluttering animated under my palm. “Who are you?” I wondered to the darkness. Who, for that matter, was I?
For the pregnancy and birth, my partner and I were attended by a trio of midwives led by a high priestess in the field. With over 30 years in the biz, she was just the witch for me. Long flowing gray hair, an utterly appealing and not-insignificant goatee of whiskers, prairie attire. On her days off, she road horses (!) and in her unassuming SE storefront office (which Seth and I affectionately referred to as the Purple Womb Room) I felt myself transforming under her watchful care.
I wasn’t a particularly anxious pregnant person, but I think that’s because the whole enterprise was utterly unknown to me. I’d never been around a pregnancy before. Still, any concerns I presented in the violet-cool light of the Womb Room were immediately becalmed by our midwife. “That’s normal, Dear,” she’d say nearly every time we saw her, widening the boundary of what I’d only moments before understood normal to describe. It turned out there was a lot of weird shit that fit inside the boundaries of normal where gestating a human was concerned. My feet transforming into swollen ham hocks on a particularly long car ride? The truly astonishing number of times I had to pee in one day by the end? All of it normal! How reassuring. As foreign changes in my body continued to announce themselves, our midwife repeated the phrase, “that’s normal, Dear,” so often and so convincingly, that it’s mollifying effects began to stretch out beyond my pregnancy and our daughter’s birth. Seth and I still say, “that’s normal, Dear,” to one another … a lot.
Here’s the other enduring bit of guidance our midwife gave me, and it too is something I draw on to this day. As my due date neared, I was becoming increasingly afraid of the pain of childbirth, and had questions about my fitness. What does one do in the face of painful contractions, I wondered. Would I get lost in the maze of them? Was there any kind of thread I could hold onto when things got real? I asked our midwife these questions and she shared a number of suggestions. But the only reply I remember mattering when my time came was this:
“Think of painful contractions like waves on the ocean. They’re not permanent.”
I can imagine how disposable this bit of counsel might sound to some, but it delivered itself unto me like a jewel. I’d spent countless of my summer days as a child and teen bobbing in the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, waves were so deeply engrained in body memory, that our midwife’s suggestion bypassed my mind altogether. My body remembered the exhilaration of getting trapped in the surf—the washing machine as I came to call it. It was frightening the first dozen or so times, sure. Struggle only made it more so. But in time, I learned to go slack when I was pinned down in the tussle. When I softened—when I let go—there was always more than enough air to carry me through. Once on the other side of the breakers, I’d surface—body full of electricity—to the bizarre and sudden stillness that followed. And then—always—there was the thrill of watching another set of waves line up on the horizon heading straight towards me.
I wouldn’t describe my 24 hour labor as thrilling, but it was holy, and it was mine. And I did hold onto the wave thread given me by my midwife, just long enough to carry me to a place where I could let go of everything. Until, at last, we welcomed our daughter’s new, pulsing life.
All this contraction talk is my way of wondering about the birth and/or death pangs at work in the collective now. Because damn, if the contractions aren’t coming swiftly. Indeed, there’s barely a pause to breathe between them. But if reading this little note of mine is any kind of breath for you—and may it be so—I want to wonder together about what it would be like allow ourselves to go slack in the breakers now. Just maybe, to experiment with softening. When we brace or stiffen in the face of something a fearful part of our personality identifies as threatening, what happens? We typically want to expel that discomfort from our bodies, either by numbing, through distraction, or … by finding something outside of ourselves to blame. It’s the death god Thanatos at work, skewering us on his roasting spit. It’s disconnection, conflict, contempt. Have any of you been experiencing this? Stress about the economy finding you picking a fight with your partner about their spending habits? Frustration with feelings of powerlessness suddenly making someone else’s level of political involvement seem totally unacceptable?
But here’s what I notice when I’m able to soften in the contraction of frightening news. I notice that the fear of frightening news lives as sensations in my body. Perhaps a tightening in my chest. A dryness in my throat. A fluttering in my solar plexus. When I don’t brace against those sensations, but simply allow myself to feel them—even to welcome them—something happens. A stillness animates beneath the sensations. It’s a dynamic stillness that feels a lot more like the work of the god Eros than his stingy brother. This is the place where a creative, connective response to frightening news lives. This is the place where we find exuberant alternatives to the death cult. This is the place of our heart.
My very dear friend reminded me this week of this quote of Rilke’s: “Our deepest fears are dragons guarding our deepest treasure.” Damn. So good. It’s a good time for us face our dragons together, Friends. A very good time to bravely move towards the treasure encoded in our vulnerable hearts.