Giving birth was not a transformative experience for me. It was intense, mundane, long, and it sucked. It was fine, and it sucked, which was exactly the goal I told my doula I had: I know it may be intense and awful, but I want it to be okay, too.
What was transformative, though, was being cared for by a doula. Being, is it a verb, doula’d? (I know it’s not, if you consider the etymology of the word, just go with me.) Last week, I wrote a newsletter about the peculiarly specific way I’ve been miserable lately: fine, but exhausted, but okay, but miserable; primarily: disconnected from any sense of creative spark, specifically about projects that felt very sparky before I had covid in December. Some of you thought I might be depressed. Maybe! Some of you reminded me that increases in depression can be a sort of covid echo-symptom. Also true! But something mundane and remarkable happened: complaining about it made me feel better.
Yes, I was writing. Yes I was finding words for experiences, connecting through my words with other people. But let’s be real, I was also complaining. And I think that act itself helped.
The first and perhaps most lasting radical gift my doula gave me was this: At our first meeting, in addition to telling her I wanted this unimaginable experience to be okay, I also told her I have a low pain tolerance, that I complain a lot. She said, “Maybe you have a high pain tolerance, and you’ve just found a good way of coping.”
Well fuck!
(Some other gifts she gave include the visualization exercise where I put myself on a beach in Costa Rica and being a safe person for me to tell, near the end, that I needed everyone to stop coaching me except for my mean OB.)
This is a terrible scientific experiment, of course, utter lack of controls, so the complaining may not have been what did it. Maybe I slept better, or maybe the two scientists I interviewed today invigorated me, in the fact of the interviews (making progress on a project that’s been looming over me) or their specifics, the conversations about things I know a bit about plus a lot of cool new ideas. Maybe it’s coincidence, maybe it’s all of that in synergy.
I realize the last email was the dark-cloud version of this speculation, now. Maybe it’s covid, maybe it’s parenting, maybe maybe maybe. Find a cause and you can fix it. [Bingo voice (for the parents): Fix fix fix.] Find what worked and you can skip the slog next time, because surely it’ll be the same.
I’m not having another kid, so I won’t be laboring again. Let’s be real, if I did it would be a planned c-section (the main prize, imo, of laboring for 36 hours and then having a c-section, but alas I will not be cashing in that coupon). But so, that one particular experience will be singular, no comparisons, no lessons to learn and apply. I don’t need to retain a single thought about labor positions (I refused to shift), about epidural timing (asap and twice), about how I really should’ve had a sip of water on the way into the OR, my mouth going so dry as to trigger a panic attack, blessings on the anesthesiologists who soaked gauze in saline for my cardboard tongue. But then, how could it not stick with me, right? I don’t think I came out changed. I definitely didn’t come out feeling stronger. No triumph or transformation, just a baby and a scar. And grateful for the small blessings—the gauze—and the 36-hour window where I was allowed to complain as much as I wanted, where complaining was a sign of my strength, my self-knowledge, a piece of the puzzle I’d clicked into place.