Excerpt from Lessons of Labor: Facing Fear
This excerpt from Julia Aziz's Lessons of Labor seems quite appropriate for the stresses we deal with during today's pandemic. Fear in any situation has a relative in fear in any other situation.
Once I was ready to get out of the shower, the doula recommended that we leave for the hospital. She checked my cervix, reassuring me that I was far enough along in the process to warrant a move to the final birthing destination.
Before gathering all my belongings, I had a crisis of faith. How would I ever manage the pain of labor while sitting in the car for 30 minutes? At home, I could walk outside and bend over with every contraction, impossible activities for the front seat of a car. I even started to debate just staying home (my doula was a homebirth midwife, after all).
Then, reason, or rather my husband’s calm rationality, took over, and we decided to go with the plan already in place. Internally, I said to myself, “I can do this because I have to and because no one else can do it for me.”
Sometimes, the only way past the hard stuff is through it. When I am in a situation where there is no out, for a few moments I may feel trapped. If I break free of that fear, then I see that there is one thing I can do, and that is to face up to what’s in front of me.
There is a freedom in having only one viable course of action. I don’t need to brainstorm, and I don’t need to negotiate. There is nothing to fight and nowhere to flee. There is just this: the clarity of knowing what I have to do and a newfound strength to do it.
This improbable freedom comes with surrendering to my place in the universe right here, right now. Knowing and accepting that I cannot escape my circumstances means I don’t need to worry about anything. I can just follow the path in front of me even if it does look treacherous.
I will never forget the time when my twelve-week-old infant needed urgent medical care for an accidental injury that occurred in the middle of the night. When my husband lifted the baby up to check his diaper in the darkened nursery, the baby had lunged forward mid-air, and the racing ceiling fan had struck him somewhere in the vicinity of his head. The baby was crying loudly without pause, and we couldn’t tell exactly where or how badly he was hurt. The pediatrician on call told us to go to the emergency room immediately. I had a moment of panic (“I’m not strong enough to handle this!”) before this same message came to me: I can do this because I have to.
My husband and I rushed our baby to the closest hospital. He parked the car while I ran down the hallways with my infant son, whispering, “You’re okay, you’re okay, I love you.” We waited through a tense four hours in the ER waiting room. I held our baby in my arms, realizing just how thoroughly devoted I was to this fragile new life. I knew, deep in my bones, that if anything were to happen to him, my heart would never truly recover.
I had no choice but to live through the fear, though. There was no avoiding the frantic rushing, the dread, or the waiting. Finally, my son was examined and, thankfully, found to have no lasting repercussions from the accident, just a bruise on his cheek.
We often think of babies as being vulnerable—to illness, to injury, to poor child-rearing—but new mothers are vulnerable, too. My heart has never been the same since I became a mother. Each child has taken a part of me into the world with him or her, a part that is as essential to my wellbeing as the rest of me, but what can I do? Hold my children so close that I suffocate them? Or instead, should I not let myself love them so much? It’s not even possible with a love that immense.
So, my heart stays open, and I go through both the easy and the hard parts that come with having children. Being a parent is a wild ride, and it takes great courage and a spirit of adventure. In the most challenging times, it helps to remember that there is only one course: living through what happens.
- Julia Aziz
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