A taste of motherhood

There are very few blogs that I actually read, but this week the one I read most regularly has been chronicling the writer's recent labor and delivery of a new little daughter. This morning I sat down and read about the actual birth.

I was taken totally off guard by the power of my own emotions as I read. Maybe it is a tribute to this woman's ability to write that her story of a natural, at-home birth carried in it the eternal, an archetype of this stunning aspect of womanhood. I sat and cried as I read, both because it was beautiful and because I can't have it and I want it so bad.

I wanted this experience that spans the gap of centuries, continents, and cultures to unite my gender. I craved this initiation into the most complex and mercurial role of a woman.

I wanted to have this experience as a beautiful reminder of the reality of this earth life: wearying but profoundly meaningful, painful but bringing forth unlimited joy. I wanted that rich opposition, that biting, concentrated morsel of life tasted even as I brought forth life.

Most importantly, I wanted to begin my motherhood by surrendering myself to something bigger, a foreshadowing of what it continues to be, a precedent for the day to day. I wanted to make the choice of swallowing motherhood whole, the good and the bad in one jaw-splitting mouthful, and making it part of me.

Despite much preparation, it didn't happen that way for me, and it won't.

I don't feel robbed or cheated: I'm too grateful for my two beautiful children to feel that way. But I do feel...sterilized. This is the only word that comes into my head as I sit here trying to place it. I feel as scrubbed down metaphorically as I was literally on the operating table for the births of both of my children. Not in a beautiful, cleansed way, but in a yellow, iodine, latex way...artificial and inert.

Every time I feel that my experience has been less than it might have been, I remind myself that while those two half hours of my life may feel comparitively lacking, Rylan and Evie are fresh, authentic and alive, as unique and wonderful as any two children that ever came. However trite it may sound, all of my heart is wrapped up in those two, and no matter how they got here, I am grateful for it. As a matter of fact, I am intensely grateful for it, because without this option, either I or them (or both) would not be here, and no mothering would be happening at all. How petty of me to mourn such a tiny aspect of motherhood when I'm up to my armpits in motherhood every day of my life.

I will not to cry foul because I didn't get the concentrated tidbit I wanted: my challenge, rather than to manage the sudden overflowing mouthful, is to catch every single stream in my mouth as it falls and savor it as it slides down.

And there is absolutely nothing artificial or inert about that.