Tonight I am very awake. Unusually awake. Suspiciously awake. To my recollection, I’ve been awake all day. We even went out for a substantial walk earlier. Ordinarily heavily pregnant Yve would have been exhausted. But here I am, tip-tapping away, positively bouncing in my chair.
So of course one may wonder if something is about to happen. And on that count I’ll have to wait and see. But regardless, staying up late has given me an opportunity to check in with some ideas that are pertinent to me right now. A theme that keeps coming up in the things I’m reading and watching today is the power of pain. The transformative power of claiming your pain; of stepping into it, welcoming it, using it.
That is what I want my birth to be like. Partly because that is how I have tried to treat pain these past few years – particularly the emotional, spiritual and mental kind. But mainly because that, I believe, is part of the sacredness of giving birth. The gift of the pain. For me personally, to dull the pain is to lose some of the opportunity. That is how I see it right now. I accept that I may be proven wrong. I accept that if the pain somehow becomes too much to deal with, dulling it would be the right choice. Especially when it’s really not about me. But I don’t expect that to happen. This is a journey for both of us, and I want to face it head-on.
The idea of the opportunity in the pain excites me. But it also scares me. I can feel I’m on a knife edge about it. That’s probably the best we can hope for, when facing real pain. But I hope that when it comes, I do more than simply cope with it. I hope I can embrace it. And see what it has to teach me.
Maybe I just had to be awake enough to reconnect with this idea.