“They call it labor for a reason.” A common refrain to a first time mother. I smile and nod. But there’s no weight that I can hold; no gravity until the labor is experienced first hand.
Months and months of build up to the due date. It passes and I weep, anxious at not knowing when my hour will come.
*
It’s the middle of the night and I feel lost in my own body while I grow another set of lungs. Lost between extra flesh and skin strained so it pulls bright red, jagged and taught. Lost under an orb, an egg, a moon containing alien life; a set of eyes that have never witnessed the beauty of waves crashing against a pink sunset sky, or tasted fresh oysters, or smelled the wet earth in the forest after a heavy rain. I feel lost swimming under the weight of expectation.
The great wait—
To open wide, wide as my mouth, wide as a clay jar, wide as the planets—
To release in a breath the air of this mystic traveler as she tumbles, for the first time, to earth.
It’s the middle of all nights and my body quivers with subtle rhythms.
It begins.
There’s no turning back. I embrace the start of this work.
*
All my life I’ve been warned that this is a curse. A curse to my gender and personhood. But in the last several months, my God has graciously peeled back layers of distortion around my labor and shown me that my toil is no curse. Man, woman—in Genesis both are warned that all of our work will be toil. The crawling creature and earthly ground are cursed by that single fall, but still we that are called good by God, we are blessed. There is help for our work.
We must withstand the cursed ground and cry out to heaven boldly. This is what I bring, in Spirit and truth, to my labor.
From my dark bedroom, wracked with pain. To a car ride through a rain streaked night. To a small hospital room, laboring, howling, with shower water pouring down. Throwing up, then unable to stand.
Blessed, blessed. The Spirit never leaves me. Quietly, He guides my work.
*
A drifting off: to experience all my bodily energy fade away. Hours and hours of toiling on my feet and on my back. Only to be taken into surgery because the work was too heavy for me alone.
In unconsciousness, I birthed my child, watered with blood, sweat, tears.
Yet the body did not fail and the Spirit remained.
*
Three days later, I am home.
The quiet month begins: dappled light through the curtains, breast milk soaked into cotton. The warmth of the baby as she sleeps.
The world became small, after the rapid heartbeat halted all other buzzing in the room.
The smallness, the wombness of my second floor, surrounds me now.
And in this quiet the Spirit ministers, steady and calm, as I continue to grow in my work: of healing, of nurturing, of becoming whole again.
A banner in the nursery reads, “Even the smallest one can change the world.”