Arrival

I knew my son would come early. I could feel it deep in the belly, that the belly would only grow so much, could only grow so much. I suspected he would knock on the door to the world at around 37 weeks, just like his sister. And lo, on the day when 37 weeks concluded, the belly showed signs that he would not be long. He would arrive less than 48 hours later.

My intellect — such a driving force in my being — tries to reach back into the last two weeks, wrap itself around them, and capture with full understanding how it all happened: the pre-labor, the 19 hours from first contraction to his emergence, the one night we spent at home, the two nights in the NICU under the lights, and the stream of nights we have spent since then riding the undulating wave of days spent nursing, playing, singing, balancing the sweetness and raw pull of our 3-year-old, connecting to the ambitions of the Olympians, wiggling in our work, drinking sleep deeply, finding moments to make eye contact and say out loud, "We have two children. We have TWO children."

Post-partum blues wrapped around me like a wool blanket when my daughter was born: at 37 weeks, I still had a few weeks of the term left to teach. Grade, respond to students' needs, close out the school year. My intellect stepped in to take care of those things, and my self-nurturing (itself a newborn at the time) could not compete. I hardly ate, I sat and nursed all day while keeping one hand on the keyboard, and I resented the offerings of others. I barely connected with the unpregnancy melting over my body, and my senses retreated deep within. It wasn't until my dear sister, a mother of four, said to me over the phone, "Get OUT. You must get out," that I began to see with some focus the ball of light I was carrying all day, and the intense youth that would be born of it in me. It took some time.

With my son, I prepared to keep my senses on the surface. I prepared our space by cleansing it of clutter, I stocked my toiletries with grapefruit and bergamot, I purchased soft nursing tops that would allow me to feed my child easily, I pledged to eat and walk slowly and drink lots and lots of water. When he arrived, I let my mother-in-law spoon-feed me, vacuum my house and do my laundry, care for my 3-year-old, and advise me from her own grounded sense of mothering. When we were told that we had to readmit my son for phototherapy, I let the big alligator tears just come as they liked while the neonatologist was explaining the process and the nurse was showing me to my sleepover room, where I would spend the next two nights waking every two hours to come to his incubator and nurse him. It was not long before I absorbed the gravity of the other struggling babies around me, and understood the sweet blessing of his health — what was a little light when I was surrounded by teeny newborns whose cries sounded like wee kittens? Humility. And a kind of sharing of maternal energy; I wanted to donate my breast milk (not allowed, but the instinct was there and pulsing). One thinks that one is tired, and one learns that there is more energy to be found.

Such was the case with my labor... My daughter opened the door with a broken water and no contractions. And so hours later I found myself bellowing through the induction as I moaned and hollered through her descent. And there she was: quiet, pensive, a low flame of the extraordinary curiosity and imagination and delicate sweetness that she would become. With my son, I had the rich fortune of understanding what a slow, building labor could be like. The first contraction I shared with my daughter, as it lifted my tushie off the couch minutes before she was set to go to school with her Dad. "Whew!" I said. I think Baby might be coming. And so he was...and the day swelled as each contraction built on the one before it, taking us walking from home through the city to the hospital, stopping to breathe through a contraction while holding on to the side of a townhouse. Labor intensified while we waited two hours to be admitted to the PETU and walked the halls. It continued to build into the late hours of the evening, and deep into the early morning, when I was almost sure that I couldn't proceed. An intersection of worries gathered in my mind in a huddle: I heard his heart decelerate with one of my contractions, and I became afraid that I could not keep him alive on the journey outward (a child's heart will do this as it makes its way through the birth canal, but I worried just the same); I worried that my ego was driving me too far in this natural delivery (ego-fearing ego, and forgetting for a moment that the body was doing what it was wildly designed to do); I feared that I was taking too long, using up finite amounts of energy; I was steeped in the pain of contracting and pushing; and I was losing touch with where he was in the journey outward. These imaginings gathered together and tried to erode the ease of knowing and feeling the process. I told the sweet, loving people in the room that I was capped out, and they told me I wasn't. What a bizarre series of moments, when some part of you lets others find a power when you, yourself, cannot seem to believe that it is there. The midwife asked me for one more push, and I drew strength from deep in the root of the body, deep in the recesses of the back, and pulled on a strong scarf wrapped round the birthing bar to push him out in a series of wails and waves of intense energy. I have a banshee in me; I think all women do. She was there at his arrival, as the midwife expertly met him at the door to the world and eased him out, taking away all of my pain. And soon he was there on my belly, not quiet like his sister, but hollering in the shocking transition from belly to world. "I see you," I kept saying, over and over, "I see you." And like some sort of seasoned mother, I had the spark of presence of mind to latch him.

In one moment, after he emerged, the midwife said to me, "What was that about how you couldn't do it?" And she kissed me on the forehead.

I owe the deepest debt to practice. Indeed, one has to have the foundational motivation to practice, a reasoning that carefully balances ego with the organic love of the child, the willingness to let pass the negative energy that might surround a growing body; the willingness to let go of guilt and fear and tune way, way in. These are keys to the parenting to come. And it was a challenge on many days to imagine how I would get through from Surya Namaskara to Savasana. Here is Urdvha Danurasana on the day when my child turned 37 weeks:

When the legs and hips and belly grew exhausted, the upper body reserved strength to step in and assist the root of the body in pushing out my child. That great marriage of opposites: upward motion with downward motion, pushing and pulling, effort and ease...that convergence was critical to his birth, to the holistic understanding of one body becoming two, to the balance of the body's healing, and, now, to the undulation of changing hormones, the ebb and flow of milk, the shifting energy of our family as it swells with even more emotion.

Today, two weeks later, I sit and type. He sleeps in a basket in the window, and I use these words to anchor the experience. My mentor tells me that some of it is not meant to be grasped; she says that women have for centuries had to let go of needing to understand the mystery of pregnancy and childbirth so that they could exist in the world, in war, in a larger web of maternal connection. When you begin to mother, she says, you mother the world. And that connection of energy is a joining of understanding and not understanding: together, we accept that we do something, have done something that is largely out of the grasp of intellect.

This is what I aim to do in these days. To slow down time, to breathe into the present, I find I must release from needing to retrace and reimagine so compulsively so that I may fully understand what has happened. This letting go soothes the intellect and makes room for the raw, soulful love that lies underneath all of our imaginings. Baby blues can be rooted in a mother's fear that she is all done, and that it is only baby now. It can be fed by worries of aging, of the end of conception, of the shift in attention from the beautiful belly to the beautiful child. A mother can forget her uniqueness, her needs, her own sweet youth. But I find with the arrival of my son that I, too, have arrived in a new way, with a kind of mothering of the self that eases doubt, even as it tries to creep in. It quiets the mind-chatter, and I bravely sit in the silence of this mystery a little more each day. And, again, I find...we find...that this precious post-natal nurturing is, too, yoga.