Hands on mine. Black no-space swirling close and intimate around me. Everything outside melts away and I am deep below the surface.

Jeremy is near, I can feel his structural support as he holds my hand tight, his presence deep and affirming. The weight of my belly is buoyed up by the deep water and I am loving the soft relaxing warmth. The nurse fumbles around in the water with a heart rate monitor, pressing the metal and plastic onto my belly. Searching with the instrument and her voice.

“He’s not there”, I thought. I sensed him deep in the birth canal, nearly crowing, his presence closer and closer to the surface. Each surge took over my entire body, the chthonic motion drawing my insides down toward the earth, while a deep resonant rumble rose up from my throat. 

Then, as if reaching a long sought threshold, I let my focus go. Slumping against the side of the tub, I lifted my eyes to meet my love’s. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” The words fell quietly out of my mouth, bearin...

I feel stirring next to me and peek my eyes through the dim light to see big eyes staring back at me. I groan, shush him, and roll over. I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to start the day. With a sigh I sit up and begin again: diaper change, hot cocoa, emails, keep the toddler from pushing the baby, put the baby down for a nap, nursing, soothing, feed the toddler, yell “for god’s sake!” while I try to work, make lunch, naptime…you get the picture. At the end of the day I feel like I’ve run a marathon and I just barely managed to get my overstrung, dead limbed, emotionally fraught body over the finish line, just in time for that elusive me time. Is my partner around? I’m not even sure I care at this point, I just want to be alone in silence until the sound of crying breaks the spell.

Is this motherhood?

I was recently reminded that there is a difference between the business of doing and the art of being. This has everything to do with pregnancy, labor and delivery, and motherhood. ...

There are so many labor and delivery preparation tools, books, methods, and teachers out there. Over the course of two pregnancies I’ve done my fair share of exploring. After all of that, I found that we can often get stuck in two places as we prepare.

The first place we can get stranded is in our head (really this one is the more evil of the two in my opinion). 

You start reading a book on labor – my favorites are Marie Mongan’s Hypnobirthing, Grantly Dick-Read’s Childbirth Without Fear, and Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery. All that fantastic information enters your head. You might learn about the way the muscles of the uterus work to move your baby out of your body, you might learn that pain in childbirth is actually a result of fear and subsequent tension, or you might read about relaxation techniques. Now all of that super juicy information (that we of course cover in beyond birthing!) is in your head, and if you leave it there, if you do nothing else but read and/or listen ...

I stepped in from the cold. Eight fresh inches on the road had made for an amusing 45 minute drive to the hospital. I stamped my boots and greeted the woman at the window.

“I’m here to have my baby, I called ahead.”

The woman looked me up and down and said, “okay, well I can’t let your husband in unless you’re staying.” Ugh, covid.

“Ok, I’m staying, shouldn’t be long now.”

She eyed me closely and said, “If you are in labor, you’re the calmest woman in labor I’ve ever seen.” 

I smiled and adjusted my crown. Flowers encircled my head and amniotic fluid dripped down my legs as I stood in the fluorescent white tiled waiting room. I felt radiant, like a glowing quaking power source had turned on inside of me and I was eager to drop in deeper.

A short time later Jeremy and I were settled into a warm quiet room, and I closed my eyes as the midwife checked my initial progress. “You’re at a six”, she declared.

The nurse raised her eyebrow and I looked over at Jeremy laughing. “Well this ...

“Persephone.” 

He looked intently at me when I described the wave I felt as “earth moving through me”.

“She’s the goddess of fertility sweetheart. She was the essence of the maiden. Then the earth opened up beneath her and Hades took her to the Underworld where she transformed into the Queen.”

Woah. I unwound my hair tie and ran my fingers through my hair. I had read the myth of Persephone and Hades as a child, and thought it was sad that she had to go live with the dead for half the year. Having been through labor, the story now took on a new vibrancy. When my contractions started I felt like I was being dragged, terrified, down into the underworld against my will. I was fighting to resurface, but the only way back was through.

But hang on a second. What would it feel like to go willingly? What if I, like Persephone, fell in love with Hades and relished going down into this dark, mysterious place of non-living, where I held power and dominion?

Persephone returns each spring, risi...

“It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t meant to, was it, doctor?”” 

Dr. Grantly Dick-Read had asked a woman who had just given birth why she had refused the routine chloroform he had offered her (chloroform preceded epidurals as an anesthetic during childbirth in the 1940’s). Her question left him perplexed and initiated his deep research into the nature of pain in childbirth. 

When I read this sentence, I tasted it over and over again. I said it aloud to see what it sounded like. I stared at the words. I tried to feel the experience of her words in my body that had suffered so much during my first labor.

“I could feel so much life force on each rush I couldn’t believe it. I wondered, is it this heavy for everyone? I guessed so and that blew my mind.”

This is the account of a woman attended by renowned midwife Ina May Gaskin. Her words echoed the deep feeling of heavy earth like energy that had moved like a wave through my body. It blew my mind too. What was that feeling? Why didn’t my contrac...

I’m throwing up into a bowl while my 1-year old cries beside me in bed. He is worried that I am dying. Sometimes I feel like it. I get wretched morning, scratch that, all-day sickness that doesn’t stop when I need to put my first born to bed at night. I soothe him, and he falls asleep. As I sneak out of the room with puke bucket in hand, a different nausea emerges from my belly and I feel anxious about how I am going to manage two of these gorgeous little ruffians. 

If you had asked me a year ago whether I would have another baby I would have said no way in hell. I really want to, but I just won’t face that torture again. Then I met a bright daring woman named Brittney, and hope flooded my every bone. She described what seemed like a fairy tale about giving birth pain free naturally. I wanted to believe her. I needed to believe her. Her eight-week course assured me I could get through the next one unscathed and I clung to this hope like a life raft in a raging sea.

7 months pregnant ...

The wave comes. I push. The wave subsides. I stop pushing. I repeat this pattern over and over again. Sound emerges from my throat heavy and deep, I direct it downward toward the dense center of my body. I watch their faces rise with excitement and fall away into disappointment as the waves come and go. “Push, push! Give it everything you’ve got!” the midwife trainee cheers me on. Jeremy’s eyes are locked on mine, glancing every now and again down to check progress. I am crying. “It’s a no” is all I can choke out.

I knew what they wanted me to do, but it was impossible. They didn’t know, couldn’t feel, what was really going on down there; I was sitting with a square block trying to get it to go through a round space. No matter what anyone said I just couldn’t fathom how it could work. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the through line, nor could I communicate with anything other than my futile and helpless, “it’s a no” (people don’t you get it?!). 

Jeremy’s face was inches from mine, se...

And then, there it was. My next adventure…Parenthood.

I panicked, and a flood of memories came into my mind…sipping a latte at my desk looking out over the San Francisco cityscape from my office; relaxing on the beach in Fiji; arriving on the first day of my MBA program to find that I was the only one in a suit; presenting my regulatory implementation strategy to someone in the EPA; looking out over the ocean at a café in Big Sur and deciding to start our own company; waking up at dawn and jumping into my hunny’s BMW convertible and driving up the California coast looking for inspiration…was it all gone? Would I ever do anything like that again?

Two lines stare back at me. My heart skips a beat, I feel nauseated, elated, and terrified. Holy hell. I feel an unfamiliar sense of intimidation as I look out on the future and I see…well, I don’t know what I see, just unknown terroir.

 I’d always thought theoretically one day maybe I would be a mom, but here it was. So now what? Okay, I kn...