As I said, I’ve always loved the month of October. There have been some memorable Octobers and some mundane ones over my 33 years. So I had this strange idea for a blogging discipline this month—take the day, count back that number of years, and write something about October of that year. For example, on October 1st, I would count back 1 year and write something about last October. I won't do it every day, and I already missed Oct. 1 and 2, and I may get bored with this by mid-month. You may get bored with it even sooner. Such is blogging...

Today is the third of October. Three years ago, it was 2002…
I was preparing for the birth of C.

I’m not a particularly granola person. I mean, we recycle and stuff, and I don’t buy Lunchables, and I’m fairly low-maintenance when it comes to dress and makeup (the latter of which I usually disdain)—but other than that, I guess I’m pretty mainstream. But for some reason, when it came to childbirth, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to try for an unmedicated labor. I still don’t know why. Well, there were some superficial reasons. Maybe even some dumb ones. The idea of a needle in my back squicks me out. I’m just stubbornly competitive enough to respond to people who say, “Oh, you will get that epidural just like everybody else does” with “Oh yeah?? Don’t tell me what I will or won’t do!”

I also knew intellectually that interventions can lead to more interventions, and sometimes complications, and even surgery (and I also know that for some of you out there, those interventions were totally needed, for a variety of reasons). But at its heart, this was not an intellectual thing. This was a spiritual thing. Pregnancy, labor and childbirth are utilitarian processes, yes—the point is to get the baby born—but they also represent a huge transition on the part of the woman (and man). Other cultures acknowledge this, but our child-centered one often does not. Drugs or no drugs, I wanted to explore this experience as a rite of passage.

Also I wanted to know: Could I, a high-achieving seminary student who lived in my head a lot of the time, learn to trust my body? Could my body, with almost no athletic prowess whatsoever, adequately prepare for the mother of all marathons? Could I believe that with the proper support and environment, my body would know what to do? Could I submit to the process without trying to manage it?

Somewhere along the way—I don’t remember where—I discovered the book Birthing from Within: An Extra-Ordinary Guide to Childbirth Preparation by Pam England. This is an exquisite book for people who are interested in such questions. And somehow, I connected with a doula, Tess, who also taught a childbirth class called “Birthing in Awareness,” which was based on England’s book.

R and I took the class in October of 2002. The class met Saturday mornings in a suburban church about 25 minutes away. We made the trek each week, as the trees along the highway blushed brilliant, then faded and shed their colors, and as the air shifted from brilliant sunny blue to damp cloudy chill. As the weather changed, each week was a different adventure.

We did the usual childbirth class things—we watched videos, we hashed out the basics of breastfeeding, we practiced pain-coping techniques, we perused charts describing the stages of labor, and we received information about epidurals and narcotics and Cesarean birth. But there were fun surprises along the way. We brought poems and writings to class that related to childbirth. We played with clay, paints and crayons, letting our intuitive selves take the lead as we discovered our own attitudes about labor, birth and parenthood.

We each developed a question, distilling down our various fears and anxieties into their most basic form. My question was along the lines of, “Can I surrender to the process without becoming passive?” I knew that there was no controlling what would happen; on the other hand, I wanted to remain true to myself and my own wisdom and not be blown about by others’ agendas and expectations. (And if anyone is wondering whether this all seems rather self-indulgent for what amounts to a few hours/days out of one’s life… well, that question is pretty much the spiritual question of my whole control-freaky life. This stuff has reverberated way beyond the events of February 11-12, 2003.)

On the last day, Tess had arranged for the birth partners (all husbands and one sister) to wash the feet of the mothers-to-be as a closing ritual. We walked in from a break to find our partners seated on the floor with basins of rose-scented water. Soft music played, mingling with tears and laughter. Tess had also suggested ahead of time that each of them bring a small gift of support. My gift from R was a purple fleece robe, which was thoughtful because he knew that the flimsy hospital gown was not exciting me so much. The women had also been asked to bring gifts, and I had scoured the Internet for a picture book about fathers and daughters. I finally settled on Owl Moon, a gorgeous Caldecott Honor book about a father who takes his little daughter owling on a cold winter night.

There is one more thing to say about that class. It is hard to put into words, but I want to try so I don’t forget it. During one of the later sessions, Tess had us write down a few of the labor techniques and comfort measures that we thought would be most helpful to us, each on a separate sheet of paper—music, warm bath/shower, something to focus on—these things comprised our “toolkit.” Earlier, we had written down a list of phrases that we would find encouraging during labor and gave them to our partner to hold (“You’re strong, You can do this, I love you.”)

Then Tess told us a story from Sumerian folklore, about the goddess Inanna and her descent into the underworld. I don’t know the actual story well, but I know that the way gets darker and more difficult, and at each of seven gates she must shed another article of clothing, and with it another symbol of her status and power. As Tess weaved this tale of hardship, we felt the heaviness of Inanna’s journey—how she started out walking proudly and confidently, then as the path grew more difficult, she had to feel her way through an ever-narrowing tunnel, stooping, crouching, and finally, crawling. When she reached the first gate, we each relinquished one of our slips of paper. And so on with the second gate, and the third. Soon our toolkit was empty—and by now they seemed rather paltry tools anyway for this long and difficult road.

And here is where our story diverged from Inanna’s, for just as the journey had reached its darkest point, there were voices of encouragement and strength all around us:
“You are strong.”
“You can do this.”
“I love you.”

Tess had not arranged this ahead of time with the birth partners, but at the right time, she looked at each of them in turn, and they knew exactly what to do.


That is the power of story. We did not merely hear the story, nor did we even simply experience it; we inhabited it. And in February of 2003, I lived it. It was just as the story had said.

And that was October, 2002.