The wisdom of pain

Thoughts on motherhood

One thing I have been thinking about since I gave birth is the range of spiritual qualities that are implicit in physical pain — the way it enforces a sort of presence that melts down the world around you. And the irony of how its sibling sensation, emotional pain, persuades (at least in my experience) just the opposite: an evacuation from the present moment.

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There’s a poeticism about pain.

When you slow down to it, you can feel its texture and hear its moan. When you close your eyes, you can see the colors that flow through it.

Pain makes you vulnerable, can bring you closer to your faith.

When you don’t resist it, it tethers you to the truth, and in your quietest, most intense moments with it, pain can feel as intimate as love does.

But it is devilish in its way of cracking you open.

Of course the thing about labor pain in particular is that it has a uniquely defined beginning and end, with the expectation of a massive pay-off on the other side.

Chronic pain or pain from an injury with an unclear recovery prognosis — any sort of physical ail with uncertainty surrounding its ending is more difficult to reckon with. There’s a sense of foreverness, whether real or not, about this kind of pain that makes it seem more intolerable. Which doesn’t mean the gift of its wisdom isn’t there, but with pain that promises cessation, it is easier to surrender.

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I started labor around 2 a.m. on a Thursday. I’d been thinking about the tacit sense of communion implied in labor for a while before — how experiencing it opens you up to an ancient, ancestral, matriarchal pain, one of the many rubbers that bind the collective mother and how because of this, while you’re in it, though you are alone, you are not at all alone.

I didn’t meet the fangs of childbirth’s preamble in my first pregnancy, but this time, we came nose to nose before it was cast out (1.5 hours before Joelle came, I asked for an epidural).

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The arc of the pain starts on low then ascends over hours into what can be described as these high-peak and steep, frequent slopes that carry the character of an angry body builder, standing on your spine and rigorously throwing 75-pound weights down to your backside every few minutes, which in spite of the weight of the valley you’re in make you feel like you’re rising. As the chucks speed up, the weights get heavier until you are sure that this moment right here is the end. Ironically, of course, it actually marks a beginning.

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There is a glory period on the arc if you are open to entertaining it where you get to know the characteristics of your pain. In my instance it took place from around 3:30 a.m. to 5 a.m., when Abie was sleeping on the chair next to me and I was alone but not alone and the pain was getting ferocious but I could still move towards it. Come to understand it newly because there’s no use in wrestling — I have discovered firsthand that suffering lives in the space between pain and her denial.

So I lay myself down, mind and body in harmony, releasing my grip from the side of the bed and following the slopes, breathing through their ascensions with deep, measured inhales, managing one more sip at peak — relieved when the exhale down would begin, downright grateful at the point of landing.

Nothing existed but the breath between the descension in progress and my body and I swear to God at one point, I could feel my maternal grandmother and an echo of women that felt like a cascading shadow by my bedside, stroking at my hair and watching with calm. This is the moment at which I felt like I’d received what I came to the pain for.

There was a gentle softness about the room in that moment and its texture remained until Joelle arrived just 1.5 hours later, the rubber of that ancient, matriarchal sensation more elastic now.

I don’t think this changes very much for me. I don’t think it makes future pain less hard or uncomfortable or even unbearable when it feels that way but it is a tender reminder that there can be peace within the most honest and vulnerable moments of fury.