Performing ‘The Good Birth’: Part Two
Turns out: I didn't emerge as The Good Birthing Person.
And that truth shook me for a period the time.
The ground I was standing on suddenly wasn't so firm...
If I wasn't those things - quiet, completely independent, always prepared - then who was I?
I didn't emerge from that birth with the confirmation that I was The Good Birthing Person personified. It hurt.
And: I am one thousand times grateful.
If I had emerged as the same person I was before, what would I have learnt? How would I have grown?
What I can see now is how desperate I was to skip the messy middle of evolution and change. How the very essence of our society and culture is invested in silencing wobbly growth and the questioning of our foundations.
We want the success, without the turbulence.
I wanted to avoid unearthing all the things that didn't serve me.
I wanted my foundations to be proved as solid.
I wanted to skirt around discomfort and head straight for 'Well Done You!'
I wanted the unruffled smoothness and the affirmation of all that I Was.
I will be grateful for my entire life that that was not what I got.
I will always be grateful that I wasn't able to stay quiet. Because these were the exact moments where I learned to claim my voice.
I will always be grateful that all the preparation I did did not save me entirely from traversing the rough parts. Because the growth walking that terrain has brought has changed my life.
I will always be grateful for how I was held by my midwife. That in the presence of pain she met my uncertain, fearful gaze - my intention to defer to The Expert - by gently standing back and allowing even more room for me to lead the way.
I will always be grateful that the pain and the noise revealed an open pit of excruciating self judgement inside me. Like a circus hall of mirrors there was no where else to look.
I was given an opportunity to meet the gaze of how I was relating to myself. To dig deeper still and find the deepest well of self compassion.
If I had known then what I know now, maybe I could have eased how jarring and confronting it felt to deviate from The Good Birthing Person I wanted to be.
The guttural noises would have been okay.
The craving for support would have been okay.
The not knowing what to do would have been okay.
The self judgement would have been okay.
The pain itself would have been okay, and the struggle to openly accept those crashing tides of pain would have been okay too.
We cannot grow without old ideas falling away.
If our foundations up until the point of birth have been largely led by societal norms, we cannot then significantly realign them with our own values, without ripping up the weeds of what's not serving us.
There is a messy middle to growth.
It is hard, it is unsettling.
And it is everything.
