Meditation

I started reading a book about Zen and motherhood yesterday. It's a book that was given to me the first time I got pregnant, and back then I read the first chapter then put it down, because it just wasn't speaking to me. This time it is. Without sounding too new-agey, I guess the universe has its own sense of timing.

My husband and I woke up very early this morning apparently to have a horrible fight. There was yelling, there were tears. After I drove him to work I came home and did my yoga practice. I tried to go beyond physical relaxation and release some of the anger I was still feeling and reach some better place emotionally and spiritually. Where this took me was somewhere surprising that I had not intended to go.

When I lost my first baby, I felt violated. And like other violations, the worst aspect of this was that it wasn't isolated to one day or week or month or one part of my life. I felt that sense of being robbed over and over, everywhere I turned, every time we failed to get pregnant again, and then to my dismay, at every moment of pregnancy when we finally did.

Pregnancy is about loss of control; this is true, in one very real sense. It's easy to feel fearful and helpless in the face of that. But I have been blaming my miscarriage for this fear and powerlessness, feeling victimized by it, instead of seeing that I was making a choice to feel that way. I couldn't really see another option. I could only see pregnancy as a tightrope across a cavern of terror and death, which I know sounds a little heavy-handed, but that has been the emotional experience for me much of the time. I was focusing on holding my balance and not looking down; coping with fear, instead of changing my point of view and stepping out of that state of fear completely.

There is another way to experience pregnancy, and that is as an empowering journey. Instead of feeling like the hapless host to a process I don't understand, I can choose to feel like a powerful giver of life, a participant in a process that my body naturally does understand and know how to do. I can honestly say that this morning, as I was focusing on my whole pregnancy - body and soul and baby - it was the first time I've ever felt ownership over this power to give birth to a new life. This is not happening to me, I am happening, I'm doing this, and it's not something to fear but something to celebrate.