The Momoir Project

It is early morning and sunlight streams like promise through the small slats of my blinds. The air is accented with the sound of my husband’s snores as he slumbers peacefully beside the indent of my lumpy body. I swing my legs to the floor. It’s May and the air is heavy with humidity.

I dread the coming days, counting in my head the number of months I have been pregnant, so many days spent in discomfort. I make it to the washroom and squat with great effort to pee. Instead, something rips through my body, threatening to tear me apart from the inside. I put one hand to my belly and silently ask if this is my son’s birth day? I am four days overdue and bursting with eagerness.

I feel another sharp pain radiate up through my body and I keel over just slightly to bear the weight of it. Suddenly I know, like I thought I would not, that it is time. I recall myself, just one week earlier standing in the doctor’s office. As I turn my head to go, I look back at him seated in his white coat.

“Will I know when I go into labour?” I ask, feeling silly and childish for having to ask.

My vision of labor is the stuff of make-believe – television programs that depict childbirth as a quick process of urgency, panic and stress. I don’t yet understand that it takes many hours to build to this point. I don’t yet know that you are never really ready. And yet, as I grip the countertop and pain shoots through my body, I know. It is odd to want this pain, but I do.

Throughout my pregnancy, like many women, I spent a great deal of time thinking about the birth process, fearing it. I did not write a birth plan, like so many of my friends, because it would have consisted of only a few words: get him out of me as quickly as possible. Make me numb with drugs. Period.

I fear pain, the process of it and its accumulation. Instead, I’d hoped to feel nothing except the joy of surrender and the beauty of his tiny body placed into my tired arms. I know there are women out there who believe childbirth should be felt, like the passage or initiation it is. But I know the limits of my body and do not wish to test them. I don’t believe this makes me less brave or less of a mother. I simply want to surrender to the advances of modern science. I want it to be over as quickly as possible.

In the end, I labored for thirteen hours. Half that time was spent gripping railings in hospital washrooms, white-knuckling the sides of my erect bed. The other half was spent in blissful peace, contemplating the curve of my son’s face and the soft dimple of his tiny belly.

But if I was determined and brave in my acceptance of labor drugs, I was also sheepish and guilty, as if those women who braved it drug-free are somehow better and more heroic. I cringe when sharing birth stories because there is inevitably one mother who clung to her pain like a lioness. I feel apologetic in those moments, sitting quietly with my son in my arms. I am apologetic because my own experience was so perfectly comfortable.

Labour pain, and this inner commingling of guilt and confidence, was a precursor for other things to come in my motherhood journey: uninvited advice, second-guessing my instinct and the destructive power of self-criticism. I am beginning to learn, if slowly, that I am not alone in feeling this way. We all question our decisions and there are so many facing us as mothers: from immunizations to co-sleeping, to diet, potty training and preschool.

I wish someone would write a universal how-to-manual of motherhood in which all the mysteries of sleep, poop and well-being are contained, and that this manual would be uncontroversial in all respects. But let’s face it, this will never happen – we will continue to debate our own decisions and the decisions of others with respect to how we raise our children. Because there is no how-to-manual, it is instinct we must rely upon: what feels right. Trust your heart, my mother always said, because in the end (and in the beginning) that is all you’ve really got.

Next week’s writing start: Trust.