Unimaginable light

When I was pregnant, my midwife told me a story she said came from the Navaho.

“When you are in labour, you don’t just enter another state of consciousness,” she said.

“You leave your body and travel to the stars to collect your baby.”

Labour has a tendency of distorting time: some moments are hazy, others are indelibly etched on your skin like a tattoo. It was the latter that I found myself in, twenty hours after labour started. In truth it was stalled: despite all my best efforts and preparatory work, I wasn’t having the dream labour that I envisioned. It was hard work, and after many days of pre and active labour, I was getting tired and doubting myself. Could I really do this? I began to wish, irrationally, for an “off” switch. I began to wish that I could change my mind.

I was lying in the birthing pool when the song came on. We had sung it to our daughter all through pregnancy, played it after we first confirmed her existence; with a dawn pregnancy test before driving to the airport for my flight to Bali.

“May these words be the first

To find your ears

The world is brighter than the sun

Now that you’re here

Though your eyes will need some time to adjust

To the overwhelming light surrounding us”*

I cried my eyes out when this song came on. Distantly, I became aware of hands on my shoulders: my partner, and our midwives. And then I was a child again. I was filled with a sense that I was small, so impossibly small and insignificant. I was overwhelmed with a fear of being a bad mother.

“I’ll give you everything I have

I’ll teach you everything I know

I promise I’ll do better

I will always hold you close

But I will learn to let you go

I promise I’ll do better

I will soften every edge

I’ll hold the world to its best,

And I’ll do better

With every heartbeat I have left

I will defend your every breath,

And I’ll do better”

I haven’t known a lot of mums. Growing up, we were quite isolated. I was a teenager by the time I began to make close friends, and at that age you don’t spend a lot of time with your friends parents. To me, there were only two kinds of mums: good ones and bad ones. I vacillated between wanting kids and not wanting them, depending on the kind of mum I thought I would become. Eventually I resolved myself to not being a mum at all. As a child, when I pictured growing old, it was always alone. I would lead a quiet existence in a house filled with books and a few cats. Motherhood was for people that weren’t like me. It wasn’t until I saw those two faint blue lines that I realised how much I wanted differently: how much I wanted to be a mum.

Everything unresolved surfaces when you have children. If you’re lucky, you get the opportunity to resolve it before you pass it onto your children. The same is true for writing and relationships: you will forever replay your hurts through your words, or through other people, searching for a way through the patterns that have become a part of you.

As the song progressed and I went deeper inside of myself, I met the young girl who has resigned herself to be a bad mother. She had not only been with me, she was a part of me. I never even realised, and in not realising her existence she had grown sad and neglected.

I grasped her hand and held her tight. I wasn’t sure if I would be a good mother, or a bad one. I was no longer sure the two terms even existed. But I knew that I would be what my mum was to me - I would be the mother that my child needed. With this realisation, the little girl disappeared. She and I were no longer the same person. And I stepped into the person I had just become.

“’Сause you are loved

You are loved more than you know

I hereby pledge all of my days

To prove it so

Though your heart is far too young to realize

The unimaginable light you hold inside”

When our daughter was born, I brought her to my chest. She gazed at me with a recognition I had never before experienced. She knew me. And, in her eyes, I knew myself.

I didn’t go to the stars to collect my baby. I never left my body, I didn’t travel anywhere.

I just went home.

* Sleeping at Last - Light