My baby turned one this month, I can’t believe it’s been an entire year since her birth. The journey we’ve been on as a family, and for me personally as an individual, in these last few years to create and add this new life to our family has been transformative.
Motherhood is more than I ever imagined, each time I’ve borne a baby I feel like I, myself, am reborn in a way. It’s a journey that stretches my body and my soul to the point of breaking and then blesses me with deeper connection to myself and the women around me. Giving birth is an act of complete surrender to obtain passage through the valley of death before birthing new life into the world, only to discover how closely life and death are connected, how intimately they flow together.
What Bed Rest Taught Me About Discomfort
My journey with my last baby was possibly the most transformative of them all, I spent almost half of the pregnancy on bed rest and in constant pain after trying every possible remedy. The experience completely pared life down, it stripped my body and soul back to their roots, as did the pandemic with it’s successive lock downs. I had never before spent so much time just sitting with discomfort. The constant physical pain and the inability to do anything, go anywhere, see anyone, was similar to a long, cold winter, barren and empty. I see now that, just like the earth needs winter, I needed that time of emptiness, that space and silence, to leave me open for a spring of growth.
What we see in the natural cycles of the earth around us are often what we need ourselves for growth, we are part of nature. We need a winter to make and hold space and silence so that tender, embryonic ideas and new life find safety to begin to take hold. It’s in the silence that I found a renewed connection to myself. It’s in the space that I found there was enough room to see my life with a clearer perspective and objectivity, to truly recognize what was serving to expand and nourish my soul and what was now too small, too constrictive to fit my values and the vastness of my heart, what spaces I would need to shrink to remain in. It’s in this empty silence that I could discover old patterns of burnout that weren’t serving me, where I could learn to recognize the early warning signs without judgement but with clarity and humility.
Acceptance Leads to Faster Growth
It’s not comfortable to be in this space, to hold the silence and sit with discomfort, but this is such a necessary step to truly find space to listen to your own soul, to unearth your unique voice that life’s experiences may have buried within you. The knowledge that spring and new, glorious growth always follow winter was the hope that carried me through.
If labouring to deliver a child has taught me anything, it’s that some pain is necessary if we yearn for transformative growth, that working with the pain in acceptance is what helps us open to new life, resisting only makes it more difficult and painful, either way it’s going to happen. Accepting this and learning that pain and discomfort are not our destination but simply a tunnel we must walk through has helped me feel less fear around uncomfortable feelings, which helps me hold more space open for myself and others, so there is a place for new growth when it does come.
Learning to sit with discomfort is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned. This was a lesson hard-won through years of postpartum anxiety with my second child but it has transformed my life completely by stripping me of the spiralling anxiety and fear that used to accompany uncomfortable feelings, replacing those feelings with space and peace, a knowing that it will pass and it might completely expand my soul.
Postpartum anxiety wreaked havoc on my life for too long because I resisted instead of accepted uncomfortable feelings. When I finally decided to see an angel of a psychologist, she taught me that resisting and labeling feelings as “bad” constantly activated my stress response and thereby deteriorated my physical and mental health. Our stress response is what help our bodies survive, but that is all, there is no thrive if we live there constantly.
The Invaluable Lesson Postpartum Anxiety Taught Me
Moving to a place where I could sit with discomfort without judgement of my feelings was the only way to move past simply surviving to growing and thriving again. Learning this lesson is what made it possible to experience my pregnancy with Madeline as an open space for future growth, it’s why at least my mental health did not deteriorate through this trying period. It’s why I can now examine myself and my inherent biases with objectivity when it comes to my relationship with myself, with my family, and the world around me. It’s what grants the required humility that true racial justice and social reform require.
When we learn to sit with discomfort, our defensive walls that block all understanding of one another never rise, because our stress/survival response isn’t triggered to keep us safe from perceived danger. Learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings without judgement opened my heart and mind to further empathy, which constantly grants my life with greater understanding of the life around me, including the children in my own home. We need to build this skill if we want a world of deeper connection with ourselves and with one another.
Connection is our Purpose, Holding Non-Judgemental Space Open is the Key
Learning all of this helped me hold space open to learn and grow like I never have before, it helped me to truly hear my voice instead of losing it. Spring has arrived, explosive growth is occurring and I have never felt more complete, more me, than right now.
“Aging,” means to grow older, it’s a never ending experience. I may have just turned 30, but I feel like life is just beginning and I am only now learning how to truly connect to myself, to my children and to all life that surrounds me. True sustenance and strength is derived from connection, I can’t wait to experience the depth of the strength I find through deep connections as I become more open to them.