10th Birthday ~ On Grifts, Gravity and Gratitude.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother . . . when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

Adrienne Rich

Ten years ago today, at a little after 2pm, I was deep in the throes of the last fifteen minutes of labor when I sat up to look at my doctor, after she had said ‘one more time’ about six times too many already and asked “How many more really? How much longer, realistically, do you think?”

I had come to the hospital the night before with close contractions and was given a low dose of morphine and sent home to try to rest at least a little before the pain would be too much and send me back to pacing my hallway. I was able to lay down for a few hours in the wee hours of the morning and then I labored eight more hours at home before my doula said it was time to make the drive over the bridge to Berkeley.

By the time I had sat up to ask that question, I was free of pain killers and beyond exhausted – it felt like every muscle in my body was trying to curl me into a tiny, miserable ball. I so desperately wanted to see relief on the horizon.

My doctor looked me straight in the eyes and she said, “about fifteen more minutes.”

I said: Oh.

And then I braced for who knows how many more contractions.

I did not say: then stop saying just one more push.

I did not say: why would you say one more when one more literally means one more??

I laid my head back on the pillow and pulled in a deep breath before pushing again. And then again. And again some more.

I felt like a tree splitting in half, like lightening was cracking me open from the place where my legs met my torso, like my trunk was ripping apart, like I was a mama nesting doll exploding to let all of the smaller ones nestled within out.

On the third or fourth push, I released a loud, guttural fuuuuuuuuuccckkkk and then, as the contraction released and I uncurled my torso again, I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, I can’t do this. I can’t.

My father, who was standing next to the head of the bed, touched my left knee and assured me I could. Told me I was strong.

And as anyone who has birthed a baby knows: there is no other option.

There is no rewind. No nevermind. No stopping the forward motion of a human pushing out for air.

There is only the rolling thunder of two bodies unjoining in a cacophonous rhyhtm of contractions and held breaths.

As my daughter’s head was cradled in the doctor’s hands, as she guided my baby’s body into the outside world, it felt like my core was burning as hot as a California wildfire. My whole body was reduced to one small place where this child who had lived within me was forcing her way out and it literally felt like flames were burning me away in order to set her free.

I pushed a few more times and the moment that she was completely outside of my body, I felt a wave of relief, the immense pressure of her near-departure vanished. I felt almost like I didn’t have a body at all, the relief was so complete.

There was still pain to endure, stitches to stitch, ice packs to apply – but she was here.

There. Outside of me.

Her eyes were wide open and her brown eyes looked almost black in those first moments. Little onyx eyes staring up at me and my sister-in-law, who was there to document the birth, captured the two of us staring at each other as I held her against my chest.

Me: in awe.

Her: I couldn’t possibly know. Except that I knew there was love there. A marrow-deep love. I was sure instantly.

And though I could not feel it then, there was a great shift in me – in my body – as I held her there, skin to skin, the umbilical cord still pulsing between us.

My center of gravity, quietly and completely, moved.

Months later, definitely by the time she was walking, I could fully feel and articulate that shift.

I felt like in the before, I was weighted at the feet. I could be swayed by wind, nearly knocked over, but I would pop back to standing like a blow up clown. I could weather a lot, but it came with vertigo and instability.

In the after, though, I was weighted in my center, in my gut – like all the weight I had was magnetized to the place where she grew and I could not be pushed over so easily; I could not be blown sideways with a strong breeze.

I felt solid in a way I never had before in my life.

Which is good, because I desperately needed it for what came next.

I had spent the third trimester of my pregnancy sobbing so often that I worried I would leech minerals from my baby and she might come out withered and weak. Or, conversely, that all my prenatal tears would make her cry constantly with giant tears like the doorman of Oz.

I had started to see that something was very off with x but I couldn’t name it. I was filled, often, with a building dread that I had made the wrong choice to have a child with him without being able to point to any specific reason. I said, out loud, lots of nights in that last month of pregnancy as I sat on the side of my bed and cried: what am I bringing a child into?

But then she was born. And nothing in the world could be wrong. What could be wrong about her tiny little toes and those giant rolls that started to grow and make crease after crease after crease in her arms and her legs? What could be wrong about the feeling of her sleeping in my lap, nestled in like a kitten, warm and quiet and content?

It took months for me to even register what x was doing or not doing. He was, for a while, peripheral and harmless. I was madly in love and I was recentered, in every sense of the word.

Until age forty, I was sure I wasn’t going to have children. For more than one reason, not the least of which was that I was afraid that I would parent like my mother; cold and distant. I changed my mind about motherhood mainly because I believed I would be doing this parent thing with a great father. I thought that, maybe, together, we could do this the right way. We could do this.

I was forty-one and had intended to never have children and yet here she was: the new axis on which my world turned. Perfection. My heart. Pumping, as they say, outside of my body.

If I had known what comes next – if I had sensed it any point before pregnancy, in any small way, any sense at all – I would have never had her.

If I had known I would be doing this all on my own while doing the hard, hard work of healing myself and helping her heal from the abuse, I would have never chosen to try.

I would have never believed I could do these things all alone.

I would never have trusted I could do this so, so differently from my own mother.

I would never have believed I could be the mom I have become.

The choice I made hinged completely on me still being conned. On me not knowing. On the future being a family with her and x and his son. On him being a good dad and us doing this together.

The choice I made was based on lies and deception and a grift that fooled me so completely that I split my body open and utterly changed my entire self, hurling me into a reality I could never have predicted and a person I never thought I could be.

That con threw me into a life I had never wanted to live and fears I didn’t see as they lurked just behind the curtains of the life I thought I was creating with x.

I cannot unwish that con, no matter how badly I may have wanted to at times.

I wish that the truth I believed had been true.

There are so many things I wish were not true for my daughter.

I wish that she had not had to weather the things she had to weather at ages four, five and six. I wish I didn’t have to preemptively talk to her teachers so they know what her trauma responses look like.

I wish she had a carefree childhood.

I wish she hadn’t needed to be so resilient.

I wish she did not know, yet, that sometimes people lie and lie and lie and you can’t ever really know why.

I do not ever wish that I didn’t have her.

I spent the first year after uncovering the mountain of lies x was keeping from me reconciling the fact that I wished I had never met him – so that the pain I felt would not exist – with the fact that if I hadn’t, I would never have met V.

If I erase him, I erase her.

I cannot erase her.

I cannot wish for a life without these betrayals even though that’s what I should want, I thought.

I cannot wish I never met him.

What does this mean? I kept asking myself.

I wondered: does this mean I have to be grateful for his lies? For the abuse?

The thought of finding gratitude for his lies and all of the betrayals felt like trying to chew glass. Impossible. Deadly.

I had a recurring day dream in the first year free from x – that year where I had to fully face that he would do anything to hurt V as long as it hurt me even more. A daydream where I could spin time back and return to when V was safely nestled in my abdomen and I could keep her healthy and safe from the outside world.

I wanted to be able to hold her there, like a perfect little snow globe oasis where she would have food and air and comfort without the confusion and pain she was living in on the outside. My joints would ache with the desire to loosen and make room for her.

I began to yearn for that dream with a pain that would make me unknowingly hold my breath at times. I wanted – no, needed – to protect who she was and what she will become with a ferocity that kept me awake so many nights, tethering my thoughts to the impossibility of a maternal fairy tale where I could cradle her safely back in the womb until the outside world was totally safe.

There is no world where I can imagine wishing to erase her.

She is a firecracker of emotion and feeling. She is a whirling brain that can unwind puzzles quickly and she notices so many small things in the world that sometimes I have to keep up with what she knows so I’m not left behind.

She is starting to be conscious of how she is seen in the world and yet still wants to wear matching pajamas and curl up in my room for movie nights. She wants to wear fake nails but still has a long list of baby dolls on her Christmas list. She loves performing on stage but will tug my arm hard to stop me if I do anything publicly she thinks is cringe.

I could still stare into her eyes – the tiger’s eye brown they are now – and know that this love is a kind all its own.

She doesn’t yet know the way that she rearranged the map of my body, of my spirit. Someday she will. Someday I will tell her that because I chose her, I became sturdier, in ways I didn’t know I could. In some ways I wish I hadn’t needed to be. But in ways that have made my life truer and more honest.

Ten years ago, I was nearly weightless except for being anchored to the ground. Gravity held my feet to the ground and I could lift them to walk or dance or run but the rest of me often felt gauzy and weightless, adrift in the way of something light tethered to a pole.

Today, I am a decade into knowing what it feels like for gravity to be holding me secure from a spot in my center. Holding the weight in my core allows me to shift and leap and veer in ways my lead feet wouldn’t allow.

I know how it feels to be sure, to trust in my ability to get through. To believe in my ability to mother.

I look at her and can’t believe that she is more than halfway to adulthood. I lived four decades before having her and, still, I can’t really remember what it felt like to be in the world without her. It sometimes feels like a dream I had of someone else who pretended to be me.

I am not happy that I was conned.

I am not grateful for the abuse or the years of deception.

Nothing about those things made me strong.

I am grateful that I was strong enough to shield this child in every way I could once those things stopped hiding. Grateful that she feels loved and protected and able.

I am grateful I get to see her becoming herself.

That I get to build the bumpers that let her roll into her own grown self.

She once told me when she was very young, after I told her that I loved her to the moon and back a million times, that she loves me until the sky turns funny .

I work to be worthy of that love every day.

I will love you past the time that the sky turns funny, V. To the outer ends and back, over and over.

Thank you for the pain that reshaped me. For the cracking open that shifted it all.

Happy tenth birthday.