Free Writing
audio: https://soundcloud.com/tia-188659352/tiakeo_findyourvoice_16
The level of discomfort had reached a new high. The months and years of daily practice to find stillness suddenly felt like poetry set to heavy metal. Her mind flickered like a camera lens that couldn't find focus. She was all over the place.
Paige had told her not to push the river, and she wasn't pushing - but damn if didn't feel like she was drowning. She was in the river, trying to be one with it, but her anxiety was increasing. She was so tense that her neck was rigid and her breathing was choppy. Powerful exhales were connected by short wispy inhales. She couldn't get enough air IN.
She remembered breathing that way during her second labor - the home birth. Her breathing had been the single flaw in her overall redemptive performance. She'd labored on her own that morning, having told herself every day since her first labor five years prior, “no one is going to do it for me.”
Her preparations had a foundation this time around. She'd quieted her brain beautifully over the course of six hours. Incrementally, she became silent within her body. She'd yielded her control and let her muscles do what they were made to do. All these years later, she could recall riding the contractions with her eyes closed, head resting on the birthing ball, hands and knees on the floor - rocking like a boat in a river. Her body had done the work and she'd simply had to get out of its way -- to ride the wave.
That experience had healed her wounds, had fixed what she had broken. Coming full circle to 38 weeks of pregnancy had allowed her to forgive herself for everything she hadn’t known - for everything she couldn’t have known the first time. She had no idea what her body knew - that she had been present in her grandmother’s womb as an egg inside her own growing mother . She had no way of knowing this blood memory back then. But she knew it now, and her inability to inhale deeply seemed relevant somehow. Had she always had difficulty breathing-in the world around her? That symbolism hit her hard.
Her body needed her to inhale, more deeply - to bring in the healing and let go of her fear and doubt. It had always seemed more productive to focus on breathing out - releasing all the issues and hang-ups to make room. She wondered now if she’d had it all backwards.
Visualizing herself struggling in the river was starting to feel more like judgement, criticism. The big picture was narrated to her in the voice of “everyone” - the everyone whose opinion and praise she still worried about and needed. She was grasping at straws now, looking for some explanation to stay safely on the shore processing, instead of letting go and living it.
She needed to be down there in the river, inside the discomfort. Riding the river like she had ridden her own waves of contractions, she was again between two states of reality. Who she used to be and who she would become was separated by this current. She needed to be willing to become the river. There was no shortcut, no easy way to travel this journey. More than anything, she knew there was no turning back now.