labor

I had a natural, unmedicated childbirth - by choice. My husband and I trained for it for 12 weeks, via the Bradley method, and we felt like we were training for a sporting event (our fantastic bradley instructor Kate Movius described it as such). When the day arrived and i went into labor, it felt every bit like a marathon and my husband was the best coach in the biz, coaching me and supporting me through every contraction.

Since then, it has been difficult to describe how I felt about my labor. It's hard to describe the pain and the emotion because I wasn't really my human self - in my labor, I was pure, raw, animal.

I love this article by Wendy Plump. It put into words what I've had such a hard time expressing. It brought me to tears to think about my labor in this way - to have an article so accurately describe what I went through: "I slogged up a mountain of pain to bring back my children alive." No matter what kind of labor a woman endures - natural, medicated, c-section, vaginal - this sentiment is valid across the board.

It's worth reading the whole article but here is my favorite excerpt:

What you do, if you are smart - whether you are enduring "natural" labor or whether you use every labor drug in the arsenal - is retreat inward to concentrate. Some women scream or curse, but this is foolhardy, as any mountaineer knows. At this height energy is sacred and squandering it, reckless. The bolts of pain come on until they are like a summit storm so howling loud that everything else is wiped out. And all the while the pelvic bones are shifting. They are cranking open, you see, like a vise. 

It is pain beyond. It is existential pain. For me, logic and advice wavered and went blank. My human identity shrank and then vanished. I was no longer wife, reporter, cyclist, bungee-jumper. I became an animal and I leaned into the long, atavistic trail to find my way. I functioned with supernatural efficiency. I couldn't pull myself up to that height as a normal human, but as a laboring woman, caught up in the extreme, I could.

Every extreme adventure reaches a point of no return, as does labor, proceeding irrevocably through its own keening wilderness.  Eighteen hours in, I started to shake. I felt hypothermic. I was run over with pain. I threw up after all - does any of this sound familiar? Hello, Ed Viesturs? Up to that point I had tried not to think about it, but eventually I did. I might die. My baby might die. I braced my foot on the bedrail and it twitched like a horse's flank. The muscles were spastic and wrung out, which was too bad because I needed them. There I was and there I would stay unless I did something really effective immediately. I snapped to and, up to my knees in my own bile and blood, awash in the ecstasy of that extreme moment, I climbed. I slogged up a mountain of pain to bring back my children alive.

Is a summit ever beautiful on the way up? If it is described at all, it is because the athlete has already come down and is dreaming back to an epiphany he may never duplicate. So when each of my sons broke through and was handed wet and warm up to my arms, he was beautiful. Nothing would ever be so beautiful. Men cry on summits. They weep out their hearts. New mothers do too, and for the same reason. We are tested on the way up, and not found wanting.

I don't have to tell you how this ends. It's the same with any extreme adventure. You can spend the rest of your days chasing a crescendo that comes anywhere near this one. You may find it on another summit. in the middle of the southern ocean, in another baby. The triumph lingers. That is why combat veterans and mothers and extreme athletes talk about this stuff so much. We are trying to figure out how we can ever again be that wonderful.

{via national geographic}