You were born, and then I was, too

“You were born during a blue moon the night that Mars was closer to the Earth than it had been in a decade,” I said to you when you were in my belly. But it wasn’t your time.

“You came into this world dancing,” I told you. “That night I jumped, cha-cha-ed, and stomped my way through the Cupid Shuffle and the Wobble. I swayed low into a squat on the dance floor. After dancing, I soaked my swollen feet in the empty beverage bucket that was still full of melted ice.” But it wasn’t your time.

We sat on the porch and watched a storm settle in over the Reservoir. We walked down to the dock,  and Daddy took a picture of my silhouette against the dark water and the dark clouds behind me as the sun set. The last light sank into the water, and when it dipped below the surface, we saw lightning drawing closer. We walked back to the house and stationed ourselves in the rocking chairs. All around us the rain came down heavy and hot. “You were born the day of the first summer storm,” I said. But it wasn’t your time.

“You were born the day a big double rainbow spread across our city and our house. I stood at the street corner with what felt like a double belly, and Daddy took a picture of me,” I said. But it wasn’t your time.

I waited and waited. I waited for you to be ready. I loved you in, and I would love you out. I trusted you and your timing. Each small miracle that passed without your birth was a message that you were making your way closer to me, from the starry land before birth to Earth where you would live among us.

The night before you were born, a red, pink, and orange sunset seared the sky. Grandma made a hearty dinner of Shepherd’s Pie, and then Daddy and I walked all around the neighborhood. Telephone wires and tree branches crisscrossed the sky, and I took a picture.

“This is the sunset that brought you into this world,” I said. Soon after that, you decided it was your time. Grandma’s Shepherd’s Pie shepherded you into this world.

I didn’t tell anyone it was your time right away. I didn’t even know it was your time. You see, you had been practicing your grand entry for quite awhile, and I think I had almost stopped believing it would actually happen.

So when my belly started to expand and contract with the squeezing sensations, I kept it to myself and went to bed as usual. But I never slept.

I got out of the bed about an hour later and turned on the salt lamps in the den, which spread a beautiful golden light across the room. I put in my earbuds and slowly rolled on my big green exercise ball in the golden darkness. Just you and me. Slowly rising and falling with the wooden flute notes floating on forest streams and carried on thunder clouds. Riding the ocean waves that crested and dipped with the slow ascent of piano notes and the sound of twinkling stars and fairy wings. Our last night together as one body. It was time.

The hospital room smelled like a temple. Ancient healing oils floated in the air. Clary sage and frankincense swirled. Purple and blue lights illuminated the space. 

You were brought into this world under the touch of so many loving hands. Daddy pressed his forehead against mine as we rocked back and forth in a slow dance, and you danced between us. While I lay in the tub, my doula Susan poured warm water over my belly and down my back, comforting me so that I could stay calm and focused for you. Later Grandma helped hold my legs back as I pushed as hard as I could and then even harder to help move your body out.

My photographer, Jess, stood as witness to all the love that brought you into my arms; she was the Love Witness, the Strength Witness, the Change Witness. Her perspective through her camera allowed us to later have a special vision in peering into all the love that manifested that day.

After many hours of working hard to get you in my arms, we knew you would need to be born from a door the doctors would cut into my belly. Our priest Jennifer prayed for us as I was wheeled into the operating room, and she was one of the first to meet you when we returned. She prayed blessings over your birth, your life, and your unfolding journey.

You were brought into this world under the touch of so many loving hands. The hands of doctors and nurses made sure you were safe and thriving on your path to the bright new light of the world. And outside of that room, scattered across the state and country, people waited to hear the news of your birth. They waited in offices, in libraries, in airplanes, in classrooms, in courtrooms, in restaurants, on couches, and in cars. 

And then you were here. In all your wonder, you were here.

“It’s a boy!” the doctor announced. You announced your own arrival by peeing on her scrubs. I heard your cries, and I heard voices making all kinds of proclamations: “He’s a big one!” “…10 lbs, 1 oz!” “22 inches long!” I cried as I heard all these numbers, the first details I would learn about you and remember forever.

But holding you was what I really wanted. To look into your eyes. To see your face for the first time. To call you by name. To see you and know you. I had imagined your face every day I carried you, sculpted it a thousand ways. In my imagination, your face was like soft, wet clay, always changing, shifting along with your movements I felt from the inside. I let you open into all the possibility of who you might be. Finally, the nurse placed you on my chest.

“Welcome to the world, Guider,” I said. “Hi. We love you. You’ve been on a long journey to get here. Was that scary? It’s ok to cry. You’re safe here. We’re your parents. We’ll take care of you always.”

….

I tell you your birth story this way today because I have told it other ways, too. I have told of the challenges and the disappointments in my natural-birth-turned-c-section. I have told of the confusion, the difficult decisions, and the unmet expectations. I have told of my struggle to process all that happened. I tell it this way today because I want you to know that just as true as the challenges were, the deep peace of bringing you into our family was real and true, too. That deep peace was at the center of delivering you into this world. You were the certainty. Wanting you and loving you was the certainty.

I have written things about your first year of life that I have feared you may read at some point and wonder, “Was something wrong with me? Why couldn’t she love me as much as she thought she could? Why couldn’t I make her happier? Why wasn’t I enough?”

I want you to know that I have loved you every instant of your existence. This love had no beginning, no starting place. I imagined who you would be before you had a heartbeat. I studied your development every week and imagined your bones hardening within me, your organs forming, your features coming into view–your lips that would sing and ask questions, your eyes that would look into mine, your toes that would graze the grass when you ran.

I want you to know that you were always enough. You were everything, and yet you couldn’t be everything. Because you deserved to be more than everything. Being everything is too much pressure. You deserved to be one perfectly glowing piece of a whole, healthy, functioning everything.

You are your own everything, not my everything. When you are your own everything, you are free to be you. When you are someone else’s everything, you see their happiness depends on you so deeply that you would do anything not to hurt them, including not being everything you might be. That is not what I want for you. I am my own everything, and you are your own everything. Together we are two beautiful everythings.

What I have written before has nothing to do with being disappointed in you. Nothing could have been purer or more beautiful than you. What I have written is about me. It’s about me having to sit with myself and figure out what it means to be someone’s mother, to be your mother. In order for me to figure out how to be your mother, I had to figure out how to be myself.

When you were born, I was a geode. I had to crack open to become your mother. Some may say it was the year I broke, the year I crumbled. I say it’s the year that I finally became myself and showed who I  am, revealing the jagged and illuminated facets of my insides. I had to break open in order to become whole.

Before you were born, I was a tightly closed bud. I didn’t know it until I felt the urgency to open for you. Once I started to open,  I saw things in myself and in the world around us that I had never seen before. Some of it scared me. I saw my own thorns and understood that to love the flower, I couldn’t hate the thorns. I had to accept those, too.

Anything unwell in my heart I can pass down to you, no matter how much I love you. You deserve a mom who loves herself. You deserve a mom who lights up the world with her passions. You deserve parents who have a healthy relationship and whose love can be seen in everything they do. Every bit of challenging work I have done, I have done for you, too.

“You brought me into this world,” one of my favorite warrior mamas, Glennon Doyle, says of her son.

It’s true. As you opened your eyes, I opened mine, too. When you saw the world for the first time, you saw a blurry, black-and-white place, and you could only see the space right in front of your face. My child, I inhabited that bright, confusing space with you. As you spoke your first words, I felt my voice rising up in me, and I couldn’t keep it inside anymore. As you pointed and named the world around you, I named and spoke feelings I had never spoken, too. As you took your first steps toward me, I took my first steps toward myself. I needed to take those steps in order to ever be fully present in the steps I travel towards you.

Your love has unraveled me. Most of the time it’s not an unraveling into a tight knot of chaos. It is the unraveling of a skein that must be set free to knit something warm and beautiful.

I see now that my love for you was not the showy bonfire with flames dancing high in the air. It was the hottest part of the fire: the coals. My constant, glowing heart. Poke it with iron and it blazes. Let the flames burn down, and still it burns hot. I didn’t know I would have to walk across the coals of my own love to reach you.

Sweet child, your labor and delivery delivered me.As I felt the love and tenderness you deserved coursing through me, I understood for the first time that I, too, deserved that same love and tenderness from myself. It’s the most beautiful love story in the world, and it’s just beginning.