"There is power that comes to women when they give birth. They don’t ask for it, it simply invades them. Accumulates like clouds on the horizon and passes through, carrying the child with it."
-Sheryl Feldman
After watching my wife deliver our son, I can't help but marvel at the deep mysteries encompassed in the female body. I can't think of any capacity or ability uniquely found in men that rivals the strength and power I saw engulf my wife during the birth process. It was awe-inspiring, and reaffirmed my faith in the pure miracle of life. The human body is a magnificent, astonishing creation that transcends simple definitions and whatever limitations we believe circumscribe it. Regardless of gender, our forms, our skeletons, our blood and lymph systems, our nerves, our structures, and our consciousness are woven together in a seamless creation that boggles the mind if you take the time to think about it. Yet we take it all for granted so often, forgetting where we came from and blithely ignoring the intractable reality of where we're going. But every now and then we're reminded of mortality and life, of the light we carry and the grace we're blessed with, and those moments where we see beyond the body give meaning to the long journey from cradle to grave. When you look past the ego, and see momentarily beyond the identification with the flesh, you understand the continuum you are a part of, the lineage you belong to, and you see for a single instant what endures beyond these impermanent machines that house our lives. If you're lucky, sometimes you're served up an experience that lets you see the links in the chain, and for a moment you can sense your place in the great progression of life unfolding through the ages...
They say that enduring the pain of childbirth is one of the reasons why women's life spans are longer than men. Perhaps that's just an old-wives tale, an assertion that can never be fully proved, but after watching my wife give birth to my son I believe it. She is stronger than I am, and the crucible she passed through has bolstered something within her. The delivery took 24 hours, starting from the moment her water broke, to the surreal and emotional coalescence when our son was placed in her arms after I cut his umbilical cord. I've never been more in awe of the power of women than I was over that stretch of hours, and the convictions the experience left me with will likely stay with me to the end of my days. The whole experience was transformational for both of us. Becky's body physically changed, was altered permanently, and though nothing I experienced is in the same realm of comparison to what she endured, I too am different from bearing witness to the process. Spiritually, energetically, and mentally, my horizons have shifted, and I see the world differently. It's not just because there's a two-week old infant sleeping in the next room, whose life I'm suddenly responsible for: it's because I've glimpsed something profound in a moment of clarity. When you see behind the veil, and catch a momentary vision of the truth of things, you cannot return to the world you knew before.
It started slow. When Becky's water broke we were having a calm, serene afternoon at our house, after spending the morning hosting 13 friends for what we called the "Last Call Brunch," one of the last gatherings of people at our home before our lives would inevitably begin revolving around our child. We figured we could cram one more party in before diaper-duty took precedence. At 5:45 pm, just a few hours after our guests had departed, I came downstairs to find Becky kneeling on the ground leaning up against a balance ball in a restorative pose. She rolled over to greet me and with the movement, her eyes went wide, and with an embarrassed look she exclaimed that she might have just had an accident and peed. This is par for the course for late term pregnancy, when women's bodies are no longer controlled by their will, although this hadn't happened before to Becky. She ambled off to the bathroom to do her business and then called to me, and told me that she thought her water had broken. We just smiled at each other for a long moment, letting the meaning of that sink in. Tonight was the night. The long wait, the 9 months of expectation and anticipation would all come to a head in a few hours. We started to move.
I spent that entire first hour frantically looking for my glasses, which I'd misplaced at some point the day before. My job was to drive us to the hospital, and navigating Chiang Mai traffic and the perils of the road without my glasses and with my wife in labor was not something I wanted to do. If anyone could have watched me, they'd note the sheer ridiculousness of how I flitted around the house, totally ADD, searching in the same places over and over again with a frantic idiocy bordering on hysteria. I turned over piles of paper, upended most of my desk, and dug through countless piles of laundry. I knew this moment was coming, and should have been more prepared, but my bag wasn't packed, my head wasn't straight, and I was not ready. It took a solid two hours for me to calm down, and it helped me to drop off our dog with our friend Abby, who had generously volunteered to watch him for a few days while we were in the hospital. Baxter had totally picked up on my manic nervous energy, and was running all through the house barking like the spastic furball that he is. Getting him out of the picture calmed the scene down considerably, and a few hours later, while packing the car, I found my glasses as well.
We were in no rush to get to the hospital, because as our birth classes had taught us, you don't really need to be there until the mother's contractions were coming 5 minutes apart, regular as clockwork. Becky had her first contraction around 7 pm, and when they started coming, they were far apart, with 45 minutes elapsing between the first and second one. They didn't get closer for a long time. So we gathered our stuff, packed our bags, ate a very simple meal, and wrapped our heads around what we needed to do. We shared a few quite, meditative moments surrounded by candles, then we slept intermittently a few minutes at a time in our guest bedroom on the ground floor in between the contractions. Becky endured the slow progression of pain with a quiet grace. Days afterwards she told me that the contractions felt subtle compared to what came later, but as we drifted in and out of short, restless naps, the pain was never far.
We debated heading to the hospital at around 1 am, but the contractions were still 10-15 minutes apart. I'm told that the experience of labor contractions is like having severe menstrual cramps, emanating from the low belly and pelvic region and causing the back to ache as they radiate out through the body. That's a somewhat clinical description, but in truth the actual reality of it completely eludes me. This is pain only women know, and any description of it I can offer is at best hearsay.
We headed to the hospital at 6 am, driving through almost empty streets and finding some very fortunate parking in front of Sriphat Hospital just as dawn was creeping over the horizon. Becky was sick in the hospital lobby, which caught me totally off guard. Luckily a hospital orderly helped her into a wheelchair and ushered us into the labor room on the 12th floor, where we would spend the next 14 long, drawn out hours. We checked in with a nurse, who examined all our paperwork, did a cursory exam of Becky, and then ushered us into our own private room in an almost empty wing. Thus began the next chapter, which was a lot less calm, and far more fraught with tension, pain, and angst. Those were probably the longest 12 hours of my life.
If you've never been in a hospital in a foreign country, you can't know the frustration of being attended to by people who don't speak your language. This was partly our fault, as we've been here over a year, and our Thai is still appallingly inadequate. We can't communicate with anyone with any confidence, even though we've both had a lot of lessons and classes. The nurses were totally hands off with us, and while they came in every half hour to check on Becky, few words were spoken, and each quick visit felt somewhat absurd. They timed the contractions, put a doppler wand to Becky's belly to hear the baby's heartbeat, and then were gone, leaving us to our own devices.
It was 9 am before our Doctor showed up. She examined Becky, told her she was dilated to 1 cm, and then recommended an IV of Pitocin to induce a faster labor. The cervix is supposed to dilate to 10 cm for natural births, which is a long process, but after 12 hours of contractions, we'd hoped to be a little further along. We wanted initially to do this with no medical interventions, and Pitocin, which is a drug that is used to induce labor, enhances contractions and escalates the whole process. Very often it also leads to further medical interventions that might not always be necessary. Becky wasn't keen on an IV, but we did it because our Doctor recommended it, and before we knew it, the nurses had poked a bunch of holes in her arm and had an IV rigged up with a drip pushing this stuff into her bloodstream. And on cue, the contractions amped up considerably.
There is a slow rhythm to labor, a certain cadence to the arrival of each contraction, with rest spaces punctuating the spaces between the pain. Every few minutes I watched Becky's body wracked with pain, her face scrunching up, her head thrown back, as low moans and grimaces filled the space between us. She apologized to me a few times, like the always graceful, well-raised woman that she is, because she was uncomfortable that I was witnessing her in a state of duress, without absolute control over her body and emotions. I told her that no apologies were necessary, and that I was there as a partner, as much as I could be, and that the business of bringing life into the world was painful, messy, and that no one should expend any energy worried about how they appear or how they're being received. It's not a public endeavor, and this was not, after all, even about us. Birth is about a new creature coming into its own existence, a new soul arriving, and we were just vehicles for it's deliverance... Perhaps my words made an impression, but before they were fully out another contraction had consumed her, and we were right back in the flush of things...
The music helped. In fact it was an essential part of our experience. We'd both built long, elaborate playlists for the occasion, 12 hours each, handpicking tracks and albums that we felt would help us maintain the right mood during labor. Hang drum meditations, long drawn-out harmonic Om chants, Glen Velez's Rhythms of the Chakras album, and beautiful gems like tracks from Bobby McFerrin's Circle Songs filled the room. Lush Indian electronica from Karsh Kale, deep dub from Fat Freddy's Drop & JBoogie, gospel hymns, old soul singers, Sanskrit mantras, and Peter Gabriel's "Last Temptation of Christ" soundtrack all made appearances, and the music helped us stay focused on the task at hand. Our child was ushered into the world on a supportive bed of sweet sounds and poignant voices, and our playlists kept us connected to each other and the work to be done. No profound, life-changing moment is complete without an appropriate soundtrack, right?
But even though it was constant, the music was still mostly in the background. By the early afternoon, we'd been at the hospital for 5 hours, and the Doctor still hadn't come back. She made an appearance at 2 pm, stayed for about 15 minutes, and regulated the Pitocin drip after examining Becky a second time. 3 cm dilated. That was not good news, as we'd hoped we'd be farther along at that point. The Pitocin had changed the dynamic of her labor, and even though Becky hadn't fully dilated, the pain was coming in strong waves. Our doctor departed, after telling us that she thought the child would probably arrive around 6 or 7 pm. Exhausted, sleep-deprived, and a little defeated, we set ourselves to the task once more with renewed fervor. Let's get this done.
I felt quite useless watching my wife hurt. The contractions came in waves, and Becky spent most of the morning and afternoon on a large balance ball, trying to find positions that were supportive and helped her endure the pain. She was determined to make it through without any pain medications. For chunks of the day, I served as a prop for her to lean on, offering arms to hold her, trying to massage her back before the next contraction hit. It was hard to watch. I'm not a fan of hippy-speak, but as the pain radiated out from her core, and sleep-deprivation affected my perception, I could feel and almost see her aura pulsing. It was like the past and the future were meeting at an axis, right at the core of my girl, who was ushering new life into being. With each contraction, as her body stretched to accommodate our son's body, it seemed like the fabric of time-space was stretching too, and the seams between her body and spirit were straining as new life was pushing outwards to be born. The emotional roller coaster was constant, but we were at a low ebb for much of the afternoon. In a desperate move, to give myself something to contribute, i asked Becky if I could start saying mantras over and over to speed the process and focus our intentions. She agreed, and for about an hour I kept up a litany of simple statements like this directed at my wife:
you are expanding and opening
you are preparing a path for our child to enter the world
you are opening a door for new life to come through you
Over and over, I kept repeating these, until I actually fell into an exhausted sleep for a few minutes, waking with a start as Becky was in mid-contraction. The mantras might have been for me, because my girl was already focused, with or without my words. She was radiant through the pain, breathing, moaning, and becoming more and more transcendent with each minute. It was like the pain was pulling her apart. As a particularly vicious contraction hit her and she expressed a moment of doubt, I offered the only worthy metaphor I could come up with at the moment: she was a being of light, and the pain she was feeling was the light of our son breaking off into its own separate luminescence. All that illuminates must burn, and the pain she was enduring was a sign of the imminent arrival of new life, light born anew, and fresh grace burning its own path into being...
The nurses came by to check and found Becky dilated to 9 cm. A flurry of activity ensued, as 6 nurses came in and out of the room, arranging machines and stations and repositioning Becky on the bed. They were ready for her to push. It took awhile for the doctor to show up, and when she walked through the door, she instructed Becky to wait for a contraction and then push. It didn't take long before the baby was crowning, and I found myself looking at a patch of slick hair as my wife grimaced through another long push. The next push yielded his head, and after that, his body came tumbling out, a mess of whitish flesh and clay-colored waxy skin, drenched and gooey. When he came out, I watched as they swiftly drained his mouth, and waiting with baited breath for a few long seconds until I saw him move and heard him gurgle and cry. That first muffled sound started me crying, and I didn't stop for the next 15 minutes. They handed me a scissors and I cut the cord without the momentousness of the act really registering, and as I blubbered in silence they handed my wife our son, putting him in her arms as she too started to cry. They wiped him down some more and we sat there, all looking at each other, realizing that his eyes were wide open as he looked up at us. There is nothing that can prepare you for new life gazing up at you. Our son was calm, and we were surrounded and basking in the kind of grace you only feel a few times in your life. The glow around Becky was almost tangible. The kid was quiet and still. I couldn't stop crying, staring down at him, one hand on the side of my face, unable to wrap my brain around the reality of it all.
I've had more than my share of profound moments, what Abraham Maslow termed "peak experiences," where you feel a cosmic sense of interconnectedness with the universe as a whole. I've had a slew of what I would call mystical experiences, ranging from the euphoria of standing at mountain top vistas, to watching dawn break over a glorious desert landscape, to basking in island sunsets at the edge of the world that render you speechless at their magnificence. I've had a rich, full, vibrant life, and have been humbled repeatedly with amazing experiences. But my son's birth was on a whole other level from anything I've ever felt before. This was primal, primordial, and suffused with meaning and grace and deep ancestral energies. This was my fate arriving in the face of a child that I'm destined to spend the rest of my years nurturing and teaching. This was the love of my life in the most pain I've ever seen another human being experience, pushing through it with determination and focus that made me proud to be her partner. This was life arriving on its own terms, the next link in the chain, DNA descending through eras and past bloodlines to a future still unwritten. This was the fabric of time-space opening up a wormhole to let divinity peek through for just an instant. It was crazy, overwhelming, and it changed both Becky and I completely. Wow. After 24 sleep-deprived hours, exhausted and drained, pushed beyond all limits, I held my son in my arms for the first time, as my wife looked upon us with a tired and beauteous gaze. It was a perfect moment, one which I'll treasure always. Life is a gift. Always remember that. Gratitude eases the flow and makes moments like this possible. Welcome to the world, Dylan Jai... You were fearfully and wonderfully made.
