|
|
SpiralMuse
SPIRIT |
 |
The Fourth Trimesterby Danger Angel
|
|
A few years ago I was in a class for a healing energy work called Sat Nam Rasayan http://www.sfsnr.org/ as taught by the Kundalini Yoga Sikhs. While working on another student, I experienced a vast, liquid pain that somehow I knew was the pain of a mother watching her children walk away from her. Sure enough, at the end of the session my "patient" told us that indeed she had been having trouble with her 16-year-old daughter, and as I worked on her she had felt a nausea and then a release. The teacher observed that the whole room had felt it - so huge was the energy I had shifted. This liquid pain was the pain of letting go. Motherhood is beautiful and joyful and oh so painful.
When the umbilical cord was cut, my 4th trimester of pregnancy began. I thought that pregnancy only lasted 9 months - with the nausea of the 1st, the hormones of the 2nd, the discomfort of the 3rd, and then labor (painful and empowering as that was) behind me I looked forward to getting my body back and being a parent to a human that was separate from me. Not so fast there lady. Letting go is hard to do, umbilical cord or no.
Now that we had a son - a difficult task was before us - naming him. There were no family names to carry on, no inspirational role models to name him after, all the normal names sounded, well... normal and all the strange names sounded like hippie drivel. We asked the baby repeatedly what he wanted to be called. We found that Travis got the best response. So we named him after the Air Force Base where his father and I had our first tryst in high school.
Travis also comes from the French word for Toll-Taker. About 2 months before we conceived Travis, we were driving around some Tibetan lamas from the Vairotsana Foundation http://www.vairotsana.org and after an evening of having them chant in the back of the car - we were stopped by the toll-taker on the bay bridge who told my boyfriend: "This is the woman God gave you - you will be married and your first child will be a son!" Psychic toll taker #47 turned out to be right. At the time we were a little taken aback - we had only just reunited after a 16-year separation - having kids was the last thing on our minds. But Travis was out there in the ether - waiting to be born - and the toll taker saw it. I think the Tibetans made our car a repository of psychic information with their chanting, and the toll-taker saw us as ripe for a reading.
After birth, I spent 2 days at the Kaiser Resort - as long as they would let me stay - because the body I was left with after the exit of my child was broken. I could barely walk, everything ached, all I wanted to do was sit on ice packs and pop vicodin. It hurt. BAD. My body had been turned inside out. And the epidural leaves you with a wicked headache on top of everything else. I'm sure I would have felt better if I had a shorter, drug-free labor - but as I went in for the extreme version of labor - I felt like I had been hit by a truck.
Why nobody really talks about this part of childbirth, I don't know, but I'm here to testify. When your bones move, it takes a long time for them to go back, and it's very painful. When I questioned my mom about her experience she said "Oh yeah - I couldn't close my legs for 2 months." Perhaps it's not polite to talk about giant blood clots, pelvis displacement, stitches, and the inability to take a poo. It seemed that every muscle south of my chin had gone on strike. One friend told me "I have never felt so alone as when I had my first bowel movement after childbirth." Hallelujah sister! A nurse that told me that the difficulty with the first bowel movement is mostly psychological. Hmmm.... a strange concept - but when my time came, sitting on the throne alone, it helped to know that.
It also was helpful to know that breastfeeding is not intuitive. There's a technical side that requires practice (and thus, failure) and some refining of technique. Luckily I experienced no problems or pain, and my son was a natural. That did not lessen the strangeness of suddenly being able to sustain life. I've always liked my boobs - they were small and unobtrusive - jogging has never been traumatic for me. Now they are enormous. I can't imagine why anyone would want big breasts - they seem so unsexual to me now. Breasts mean business! My favorite breastfeeding book is called "So THAT'S what they're for!" and the truth of that is hard to explain until a baby has been at your breast. Titty bars should serve milk. Period.
The first thing everyone asks is "Are you/he sleeping?" We didn't so much as decide as intuit that the family bed was the answer if sleeping was the question. My boyfriend laid the baby on his naked chest on his first day in the world - and he slept, well, like a baby. Western culture is the only one that puts babies to sleep alone - and it just felt wrong to have him anywhere except next to me. Even now, as I write this, I wish I were in bed with my baby and boyfriend - a family snuggling together against the cold, harsh world. People worry that you might roll over onto the baby - but when was the last time you rolled out of bed and fell on the floor? You just know where the edge and where the baby is - and you don't even go there.
I never got post-partum depression - being cheerful under duress seems to be my superpower - so I wasn't expecting to get sad. I did however, experience a monumental shift in my emotional tectonic plates. Suddenly every child tugs my heartstrings. The mere idea that there are orphans, children who are sick or abused, or simply raised in dysfunctional environments gives me physical pain. Prior to giving birth I considered myself an empath - a compassionate person who wished to help everyone. That has increased a hundredfold. I think of all children as potentially mine - I even imagine that someday we will adopt or foster children away from the great pit of despair that the world can be. And the idea that one day, my child will feel pain that I will not be able to comfort is dreadful. Letting go is hard to do. That vast liquid pain of motherhood is mine now.
But with it comes a love so huge it's hard to imagine. My boyfriend and I are stunned by our joy and love and delight in our son. It helps that he's perfect in every way, but that's what all the parents say. "Now I know how much my mother loved me," said my boyfriend, "and our son will not understand this until he has children of his own." Someone told my mother that what makes being a grandparent so great is that finally you get to share the experience of parental love with your child.
My favorite parenting magazine Brain, Child http://www.brainchildmag.com had a wonderful article by Mark Walters (indeed, fathers feel this pain too) in which he states "...we try to counsel and control our children in order to spare them disappointment and pain since, as every parent knows and no child fully understands, their pain is ours, and we'd willingly absorb it all so that they might not suffer."
As my son enters his 4th month, I take joy in how he needs me, but every moment he needs me less and less, and every moment I let go.
-Danger Angel
Back to Family
top >> |
|
|
|
HOME
SUB 1 | HOME SUB
2 | HOME SUB 3 | HOME
SUB 4 | HOME SUB
5 | HOME SUB 6 | HOME
SUB 7
