The Grief of Losing My Mother Helped Me Find Birthwork
Ok, it wasn’t that linear... but grief never is. My mother died when I was twenty six years old. It shook me to say the least. My mother, the one who brought me into the world - gone. It was abrupt, painful and it threw me for a loop. It also shot me into action, I packed up my life, moved to a new city (New York City just to make it extra interesting) and changed my career completely. I went through the typical stages of grief just through a twenty-something year old filter. I found myself drawn to nurturing. I began to nanny and found myself healing... slowly. It was mostly denial for a long time, even close friends told me things like “six weeks is long enough to grieve”. Insanity. But that’s how it is, when you’re grieving you’re also in constant movement, be it literal or the mental or emotional movement. You’re treading water, but you’re also getting somewhere, even if you don’t realize it - like a current pulling you to shore, even if you don’t want to reach that shore because it means you left the vastness of your ocean of grief behind in some way.
So I was a full time nanny and I was a part of a family unit and it kind of accidentally pulled me through grief. But then, it was still there. I really saw it rear its head on my birthday. I didn’t expect MY birthday to be the one to send me into a grief spiral, but I also don’t think we all realize what our birthdays really are. Our birthdays aren’t ours. No, not at all. With all due respect, your birthday belongs to whomever birthed you. It’s their BIRTH day. I would make a universal push for us to recognize birthdays as the “day 1” like most do for a baby - so the next day can be your day. But that first day, that first 24 hours... it belongs to the birther.
And that’s what I discovered on my first birthday without my mom. It was her day. She did so much to bring me into the world. She carried me, she imagined me, cried for my health and safety into the world, she birthed me. She underwent a major surgery - a cesarean to bring me into this world. She let her body be opened to open the world for me, she fed me and held me and comforted me on that day. That’s why the grief came for me on that first birthday without my mom. Because it was her day, not mine.
And then as I walked myself into becoming a parent. To expecting my first child and in doing so becoming a motherless mother. I remember the joy I found in those childbirth education classes, learning about all of it, really having a new perspective on what it means to carry, to labor and to birth. And in those classes fully understanding the grief that walks with birth. The grief of the reality that birth is as close as we get to death as well. It is a glimpse into your mortality and unfortunately for some that mortality is ever more present in this country.
Oftentimes I find that my clients need to be reminded of that grief. To prepare for that grief and to allow it space. Welcome it, go through it and honor it. The amount of clients - especially expecting a second child, that I walk through that grief with in the birth space, so that they can welcome their next child is abundant. The grief of acknowledging the change of one's life and family dynamic to welcome a new child is powerful.
Grief will find you in many ways, I find that in becoming a parent, grief is all around us. The grief of losing your past self. The grief of losing your previous life! The grief of losing friends from that previous life, that saw you and knew you but don’t quite know the new you. The grief of the transformation of your relationship - if you have a partner how that changes and evolves and becomes less about both of you and more about this small new human. The grief of the changes your body meets and that loss of autonomy. The grief of the way fear and anxiety can attack you in your postpartum and new parenthood space.
Grief meets us all at different places, in different forms and evolves in new ways. For me I know that every time I walk into a birth space, meet a new client or student in my childbirth education classes - we are going to have to confront grief together in one way or another. My wish is that we all find ourselves on the other side of grief - that we are able to ride that current in, look back on that ocean we came through and walk it together, not alone.
