“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing
Sometimes you face the impossible and bravery has nothing to do with it. Bravery implies there was some sort of choice. You could give into your fear, or you could act in spite of it. But sometimes the very thing you fear most leaves you no choices. The only way out is through. That courageous stuff gets thrown out the window and you’re left in front of a darkness you haven’t faced before. The car is driving into it and you are not in the driver’s seat. Spoiler alert: There is utter childlike dependency and helplessness in there, but so is something more.
A painted picture if you will:
You wake up at 5:30am in midwinter, dizzy with nausea, and drive to work anyway. You come home over 13 hours later and do it again week after week. You’re counting down the weeks with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. You haven’t done this before. This is new and scary and exciting all at once.
The countdown continues and you’re in constant achy pain. I’d like to be done with this part now. But you feel you can’t even say that because if this is hard and painful then how on earth are you going to make it through the part where she’s actually born?
That time arrives whether you think you are ready or not. You walk into a hospital before sunrise some months later as a family of two and know you will be leaving as a family of three. But what has to come first is the hardest thing you have ever had to do. A lifelong fear of doctor’s offices and being a patient doesn’t help.
People do this every day. Every day. Every day. You can do it once.
You labor for 72 hours, barely making progress, until they finally tell you, yes! She’s going to be here soon! Only for them to come back almost an hour later and say actually, she isn’t coming out on her own. Your body is too tired.
They say the words you’ve been dreading most.
You can’t do it. Literally. Your body has been trying for days and it’s out of energy. Not only is something wrong with me, it’s affecting my baby.
I don’t know how to describe the collapse I felt emotionally at that revelation. There’s a cruel sort of helplessness that follows the feeling of failure.
I sign on a dotted line with not much of a choice. (Yes, they make you sign paperwork after delivering news like that.) Mere minutes later I’m wheeled away for surgery. I am shaking with fear and from the painkillers in my system. There is an oxygen mask over my face but I’ve been panic crying so my nose is so congested I can’t breathe it in. The lights are so bright. There are so many nurses telling me to smile because she’s going to be here soon (don’t even get me started). They don’t let my husband into the room until the last second, and I’m desperate to be near him. To not be alone.
One man remarks that my baby and him will share a birthday. “That’s nice. Happy birthday.” I manage to croak out. “What day is it?”
Right before this, in the flurry of paperwork and preparation, my husband handed me a phone and I read/listened to prayers sent as texts and voice notes from some of the humans I love most in the world. He’d watched my composure collapse when the doctors had given us the news, and he called in the cavalry, collecting prayers from voices I needed badly as my panic started rising. It is a kindness I will never forget. And it gets me through those minutes under blinding lights until I finally see him enter the room and stand next to me.
And then I hear her cry for the first time. They bring her around the sheet of hospital paper and hold her close to my face, and I just barely touch her with my cheek against hers.
She’s alright. She’s alright.
It’s a prayer. It’s a praise. It’s a sigh of relief.
We leave as a family of three a few days later. The impossible was done, and I’m still alive and…well? Physically yes. I recovered faster than I thought after the horror stories I had heard from others previously. I could walk on my own in less than two days.
Mentally? As the months have passed, what was already a blurry mix of memories in my mind has grown even cloudier.
I realized a few weeks ago that I don’t remember holding her in my arms for the first time.
It hit me slowly and stung far faster.
How can you not remember holding the person you waited to meet for 10 months? Who you now can’t imagine your life without?
I remember seeing her for the first time, her face brushing against my face in her pink and blue stripey hospital hat. But after leaving that operating room? I don’t remember the next 7 hours. At all.
I know I saw my husband feed her and change her and swaddle her, since I couldn’t do any of that myself. I know I held her in my arms, trying not to doze off, and then I’d wake to find her back in her little plastic baby bassinet next to me. But I only know these things happened because he told me. I don’t remember them.
I do remember her grandparents holding her for the first time many hours later and being finally transferred to a room with a window for the remainder of our stay. I had never been so happy to see daylight. I remember other aspects of recovery in the following 24 hours that I wish I could forget.
But I don’t remember holding her for the first time.
What if she asks me one day? Mama what was it like when I was a baby and you held me for the first time?
The emotions cascade one after the other in a downward spiral.
Sadness. Grief. Fear. Guilt. Anger surrounds them all in ruthless red ribbon and pulls them in tight.
This isn’t how I imagined it. This isn’t the way it was supposed to go.
And from within that warped view comes a terrifying thought.
Is it because I didn’t pray specifically enough?
I asked for us both to be alright, and to forget the scary hospital experience. Check and check. But I didn’t specifically ask to remember my daughter in the midst of it, so she was wiped away as well. Like He’s some trickster, a creature out of folklore who will turn your requests against you with loopholes you didn’t think to cover in the contract.
But then I have month after month at home with this beautiful girl, and I want to weep at how easy it is to love her. How I want nothing but goodness and wholeness for her. How much I miss her even when she’s asleep in the next room. How when I make her laugh on accident I will repeat the expression endlessly if it means she will laugh again. How my whole body aches when she cries, and how I would do anything to stop it, even when I know she’s alright and just communicating in the only way she can.
I think of a line from one of my favorite poets:
“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night…Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.” (Read the whole poem it’s gorgeous.)
Don’t let yourself lose me.
And then I hear the rest of it.
You are my girl too. Just like her.
I remember who He is, and who He is not. He is not looking for loopholes in my prayers to take away things I love and then blame me for it. He is not presenting impossible challenges like a ruthless taskmaster and scowling in disappointment when I limp out of some of them with literal and metaphorical scars instead of glowing in triumph and energetic victory at another mountain scaled.
Maybe. Maybe my brain is doing what it is supposed to. It’s trying to block out a time I’ve felt more fear than ever before, and in the process a few joys that followed have been obscured.
Alongside that anger, held in the other hand just as tightly, is gratitude. Overwhelming relief that I live in the era I live in now, when modern medicine can intervene when things go wrong and save lives.
It could have been so much worse. I’m not going to forget that.
I do think it’s permissible to hold both. Deep unending thankfulness that she arrived in perfect condition, with no injury, no complications afterward, and no issues whatsoever. Grief that I couldn’t properly participate in an ancient process my body was naturally designed to do, and that I don’t remember the golden hours after her arrival as a result of the process that had to be done instead.
Maybe one day those memories will come back to me. Maybe they won’t. In the meantime, I just ask my husband to tell me about it in those times I wish I remembered. He was there for every minute of it, and there is something heartwarming about hearing about her first hours from his eyes.
I am also comforted by the fact that there was a fourth presence in the room with us in those hours (and in the ones leading up to that, and all the ones before it and after it for that matter). And He remembers all things perfectly.
Even the scariest ones, when they strapped my arms down, outstretched as far as they would go to either side, surrounded by strangers yet utterly alone for the worst handful of seconds.
This is it. This terrifying impossible moment. The only way out is through. I’m going to have to trust you.
It’s not bravery. It’s not optimism. It’s this is all that’s left now.
Rubber meets road in the blinding dark, except that dark is hospital lights. It’s anything but gentle, and it smells like something is burning.
I’m reminded of another time, long long ago, when another willingly let His arms be stretched as wide as they would go, surrendering to a moment that was dreaded with soul-wrenching anxiety, so that another, so many others in fact, might live.
This is my body…broken…for…
You.
He’s never been against me. If anything, I can look up at His face one day and a look will pass between us. A glimmer of additional understanding of sorts that I wouldn’t have had in that way before.
Is there anything you would not do for the one you love?
No. And I know in my heart of hearts, I would do it again a hundred times over if it meant she was alive and whole and well.
He smiles. See? See how you don’t even need a second thought? See how easy it is? To love you. To delight in your very existence before you’ve done a single thing. You just might understand the smallest fraction of it now.
How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure.
Even when the cost of such love is painful. Even when it demands sacrifice. Arms-stretched-as-wide-as-they-will-go sacrifice.
See how easy it is? To love you.
Even in the dark that I didn’t choose. Even without bravery. Even with shame and failure and doubt, crying because I don’t know how else to communicate. There’s an overwhelming, steady, never-ending or leaving love in that darkness too.
He has always been on my side and by my side. And since He is everlasting and perfect and good, nothing is truly lost. He holds what I no longer remember in the perfect vault of His own memory. My sense of control, the reserves of my courage, my own limited memory, my thoughts and prayers and intentions, are not the final failsafe.
Months later, she’s growing so fast. They say “don’t blink”, and I get the sentiment. But I have to blink sometimes. I inevitably miss things.
He is there to comfort me when my mind falls short of what I want it to contain, since it cannot hold it all anyway. And one day He will walk me through every joy I have forgotten, every photo I didn’t manage to save, or video I didn’t capture of her beautiful laugh as she grows and crawls and reaches for me with arms outstretched, and show them to me.
And then He’ll show me that He saved all those moments from my own life as well.
See how easy it is? To love you.
I’m still processing. Still sad sometimes. I’m also grateful. Grateful to watch my girl playing in her room and singing to herself, oblivious to my observation, and feeling like my heart could drown quite happily in the love that somehow grows for her every day. A love, I’m learning, that existed long before her or me, that is vast beyond all measure.
“So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.”
—Matthew 7:11
Nothing is lost. Not forever. And if grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
“But here’s the thing about carrying light with you: No matter where you go, and no matter what you find—or don’t find—you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through it. This flickering? It’s mine. This path is mine.”
—Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful
