Guest post: Slightly Cosmopolitan
Posted on | October 11, 2013 | 2 Comments
While I'm away in Italy I asked a few friends/fellow bloggers if they would help keep Pleasure in the Pathless Woods running, and they all agreed! A mighty thank you to each of you!
My next post is by Heidi who blogs over at Slightly Cosmopolitan. Heidi is a wife, mother to two cute kiddos (almost 3!), and describes herself as "profoundly ordinary." But you see, that's what has kept me reading her blog over the years. She describes her ordinary days and feelings with lovely intensity, and I found myself adoring her writing style & eager to see the new chapters in her life unfold. Her post just happens to be one of my favorite topics - birth. I feel honored that you shared such a thing, thank you Heidi!
On Birthing
I birthed my first baby in November while winter’s first snow slipped quietly through the air, blanketing the earth around us in a clean slate of white. “How fitting,” I thought, “that our son made his entrance to this life while winter made her fresh appearance for the season,” and I loved that my winter-loving husband could one day tell his firstborn of how new snow and new life mingled together to turn him into a daddy.
I knew enough to know that no matter how prepared and researched I was, I didn’t know what to expect out of motherhood...I didn’t know how to be a mother. Although I loved him something fierce from the moment he wriggled on my chest, it took time to realize that even though I had birthed our family a baby, that baby had birthed in me a mother, and I had to learn to trust in this gift he had given me and remember to dwell in this new identity he had created when I pushed...and pushed...and pushed...him from my body.
My second baby, a wee 13-week wisp of hope, I birthed – asleep – in the operating room while the doctor gently excised her from my body. After five years of infertility and despair, her brief stay hardly seemed substantial enough to make a difference. But I had learned enough from my first birth to know that just as a baby’s birth is a physical inevitability, so does the baby birth something in the mother that’s a spiritual inevitability, and I mourned the fact that I’d be asleep during that experience. You can read more about my experience with her loss here.
Grief mixed with anesthesia certainly shaped my experience, but it actually took less time after her birth than my firstborn’s birth to realize what she birthed in me, a surprising blend of the seeds for happiness and patience. I spent the better part of the year tending the soil of grief and watering these seeds with my tears, and my gratitude to her has only grown with the passage of time because I don’t think any other baby could have birthed these things in my being.
My third baby, another girl, I birthed in much the same way as my first, but with a strange mix of confidence and fear. Whereas with my son I labored without the benefit of a mother’s heart (since he hadn’t birthed it in me yet) and went along with things that didn’t feel right because I didn’t know otherwise, this time his gift to me was in full effect. I knew what I needed and fought for those things and trusted the mother within. At the same time, however, I was wracked with fear that she could leave me in one breath, and I couldn’t bear the thought of loving and losing again. I think I held my breath from the moment my water broke until my midwife told me I could push, which I couldn’t do right away because I was too busy exhaling and crying and trying to gather the focus and commitment it would take to become a mother again. You can read more about her birth story here.
I hesitate to say her birth experience has been my favorite; how can I pick one over the others when each of the resultant gifts to me has been equally exquisite? But as I reached down and drew her from my body with my own hands, she birthed in me a holy healing and lightness of spirit that defies words. The closest description I have is that of tenacious hope, sweet hope, soul hope. If I could relive any moment from my life, it would be this moment, and I would relive it again and again to drink in every single detail of the experience.At 30 weeks pregnant, I’m nearing the eve of the birth of my fourth baby, another boy, and although I’m anticipating how much I’ll revel in meeting him and bringing him into our family and experiencing the delicious snuggles and coos of a newborn, I’m also curious and eager to discover what he’ll birth in me while I’m busy birthing him. Who will I be when I finally look into his eyes and kiss his dewy face and gather his spindly body to my chest to nourish him? I have no idea.
Just as I know I can’t absolutely guarantee the details of his physical birth – vaginal or caesarean, natural or unmedicated, hospital or home, born to me on earth or, God forbid, born directly to heaven – I also know I can’t forecast what spiritual gifts he’ll bring to me. What I know with complete certainty is that children aren’t born empty-handed – and I can’t wait to discover life anew with this next little one.
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- April
- I am a RN & natural momma in the Pacific Northwest, married to a beautiful man I adore. Nature is my niche, animals get me. I read and I write, I hike and I love photography. Welcomed our daughter Hazel Annan earthside in February 2012 after three years of infertility & our second miracle daughter Juniper Louise in April 2014.
October 13, 2013 at 10:27 AM
Heidi, I read your blog with joy & tears as I remember each of these experiences. Each time I wanted to fix whatever might go wrong so everything would be perfect. Reading this today has shown me again that this has all be perfectly developed in God's good plan. I love Gabe & Isla and look forward to meeting your next son here and previous Mara in heaven. (Dad)
October 14, 2013 at 8:14 PM
Thanks, Dad! :)