There are many stories about births that turn one over.
About the pain. About the chaos. About the moment when control disappears and you just have to surrender to your body.
There are many stories about births that turn one over.
About the pain. About the chaos. About the moment when control disappears and you just have to surrender to your body.
But there are fewer stories about birth as something that brings one back together.
My second birth became such a story.
Not because my first birth was wrong. But because it left something in me.
The first time I became a mother at once. I didn’t catch up until I was already in the new. I had not experienced it before – neither the total surrender of my own body, the love that was suddenly there without me being able to understand it, nor the responsibility that lay concretely in my arms.
The first time you give birth is not just a child. You also give birth to yourself as a mother.
The second time was different.
I entered the delivery room with experience in my body. Not as a plan, but as a calm knowledge that I had been here before – just not in the same place.
Everything that had knocked me over the first time was still there. But it wasn’t foreign anymore.
I knew what it could feel like to be in something bigger than myself without disappearing into it.
And maybe that was exactly what made the second birth so different: I wasn’t swept away by the unknown. I was present in it.
There was time. There was a surplus. There was a quiet but roaring strength that was not about getting through something, but about being in it.
And perhaps the most moving thing was how calmly it all landed – and how it healed something inside me.
My son came into the world with such gentleness that you could hardly tell from the blood sample from the umbilical cord that he had just been through a birth. As if the violence had already passed when he lay in my arms. He just was. Right here. Already at home.
And it struck me that this was also how I landed myself this time.
Not as someone who had to find myself again.
But as one who was already here.
My first birth taught me that I could survive the big transitions in life.
My second taught me that I could trust myself in them.
