Birth Magic

Once again, I am unsure of what to write. I can't really give details for fear of compromising someone's privacy, but I wish you could see what I have seen.

I have spent the last 4--soon to be 5 and over--weeks working in obstetrics and gynecology. It has been a wonderful experience all around, but by far the most incredible act I have witnessed is childbirth. 

In my four weeks I have been lucky to experience the full range--c sections and vaginal deliveries, planned and emergent, and both spent many hours in the hospital waiting for a delivery and sprinted from the parking lot down the hospital corridors in order to make it before baby did. 

There are a few things that always reaffirm my faith in humanity: national parks, libraries, and now childbirth. What women are capable of is nothing short of incredible. It doesn't matter what kind of birth--an epidural can take away the sharp pain but it doesn't change the feeling of pressure of a baby head passing through a formerly 1 centimeter hole. And the woman getting a c section faces the coldness of an operating room, with only a thin blue sheet dividing them from their internal organs which are now briefly literally on the outside.

The fathers too have been amazing. Supportive and present and weathering the storm with their partner. The whole process is like a trial by combat that you must come through in order to leave with the new life you created.

And the babies! They are so astonishingly perfect. Even covered in blood and purple. Even if they aren't perfect by a medical definition. I can't believe this is how we all came into the world.

We are all the product of untold hours of labor, stretching back in time. In the fields and the forest, by firelight or starlight, in back bedrooms and first hospitals, by candle and operating room lamp. So many mothers and babies died in the process, in this fierce baptism of pain and blood and insane strength to push gathered from somewhere deep within. 

If we could each trace our own history what would we find? How many hours in a thousand years have our mothers and grandmothers and great great great grandmothers given us? How much strength has been passed down?

It is an unspoken legacy we all carry. Look what our mothers were capable of. Look what insane iron magic we are made of. Whatever else happens, how ever else you feel about your day and your life, know that this is your stock.

This is your birthright.  This is your mother.