Make a New Plan, Stan

Get yourself free

Today I’ll be driving toward my son on the nineteenth anniversary of his birthday — and the day that marks my nineteenth year as someone’s mother — which feels crazy. In the car riding shotgun will be my sixteen-year-old daughter, who certainly benefits from being my second child whether she knows it or not. She probably does know it, she’s extremely smart. Also, she will drive some of the way because she has her permit, somehow. Yesterday she was my baby. Time is a fickle mister.

It feels like a good moment to tell you two huge things I learned before either of them called me Mom, before I counted their impossibly tiny fingers and toes, before I sobbed with relief as I held them for the first time — because they were okay and I was also okay.

I did not have an easy time getting pregnant, and that is a story in itself, but for another day. A day when my memoir is a thing in the world you can hold in your hands, because the whole story is in there.

Suffice it to say it took me a little over a year to get pregnant with my son, and a lot of people and devices along the way. Sounds like a good time, maybe. Until you hear that one of these people was an acupuncturist who ended up blaming me for my lack of fertility since “all her other clients were pregnant.” None of the countless pots of tea she had me boil seemed to do the trick, unless the goal was to make the house smell like a bog, in which case, mission accomplished.

There were hundreds of pH sticks, a thermometer, a calendar, one Maori giant named Papa Joe, one unspeakably painful “uterus massage” (maybe don’t ask), and one fertility doctor — last name, Mars. He turned out to be fantastic.

There was also one ex husband involved, though he was not an ex at the time, one turkey baster (okay, it was not a turkey baster, but whatever the technical name is for that contraption) and, probably, whatever kismet exists that made my particular, kindhearted, lionhearted son transition from stardust into the nine pound baby I pushed into this world. (If you’re a Scorpio like he is, technically he was 8 pounds, 15 ounces.) 22 inches long. Time of birth, 7:19 pm PST.

Four months AD (after Dylan)

When I finally had a positive pregnancy test, I was relieved and amazed and as grateful as I’ve ever been about anything. I’d gotten pretty tired of sobbing in the bathroom every month when I got my period, cursing myself and wondering why I couldn’t seem to do this one thing my body was (purportedly) supposed to be able to do. It hurt like hell and I’d started to feel hopeless and alone and worried it might not ever happen.

Now I was elated and ecstatic and overjoyed. I was also doing a very demanding kind of yoga at the time. The kind where they stand on you and push on you and pull on you and twist you into all kinds of shapes. There are poses you do in a set sequence or “series” and you can’t get the next pose in the sequence until you’ve mastered all the poses leading up to it.

Once you’ve mastered all the poses in one series, you get the next series. There are six series total. Very few people make it past the third series, I was working my way through it when I got pregnant.

I’d been doing this practice at the crack of dawn every morning for years. I also assisted in the room, and taught for my teacher when he would go to India for a month at a time to study. Some of you may be familiar with Ashtanga yoga. It’s demanding and fast-paced and very likely not the best practice for Type A perfectionists, not that I’d know anything about that.

So the first morning I went to practice after I’d gotten the positive pregnancy test, I stood on my mat in Mountain Pose, which is basically just standing up mindfully. Feet rooting down — muscles, energy, and intention rising up. In Ashtanga there’s a chant to begin your practice, and I brought my hands to prayer in front of my heart, but suddenly this thought bellowed through my mind, like it was ricocheting off the inside of my cranium and reverberating along every synapse I had, as if to make sure I received the freaking message: Today you have to be gentle, there’s someone in here counting on you.

I froze. Maybe I should mention I’d been practicing for fifteen years at this point, teaching for about twelve by then. Some of the main ideas of the entire practice are compassion, non-harming and awareness. So how was it I needed to remind myself to be gentle? Was I…not usually gentle? (Reader, I was not usually gentle).

More importantly — wasn’t there always “someone in here counting on me”? As in, me? And if that was the case, why did I not register as worthy of my own care and compassion? Why did I only care about how I was treating my body and treating myself if there was another person inside me? I felt like someone had turned on all the lights inside my own head and exposed the faulty wiring. Thankfully that someone was me, so at least the upside was I must be ready to face the situation head-on.

I realized in that one moment that I’d spent the last fifteen years on my mat strengthening all my perfectionism tendencies. All my “please the teacher” bullshit, as if I was going to get a gold star for putting my ankle behind my head. I talked about empathy when I taught, but I put myself outside my own circle of compassion. Childs’ pose was okay for everyone but me. Oops.

I decided right then I was done living like that. I was going to figure out how to rewire my system before I took over the care of another entire human being. My yoga mat seemed like a good place to get to work. I’d treat it like my own personal laboratory. I’d stay curious, and make my practice about being in partnership with my body — really listening, and responding with respect and gratitude.

I’d only ever treated my body with contempt — mixed with brief periods of satisfaction when I’d denied myself enough or pushed myself enough to feel thin enough or strong enough to be good enough. But good enough for what, or for whom, exactly? The much older boyfriend who told me when I was nineteen that he’d get me a boob job and a Mazda Miata if we were still together when I was twenty-five?

The boyfriend who said maybe I didn’t need that bowl of cereal, and he was bummed I didn’t look like a supermodel in my bikini? This old tape in my head, running underneath everything, saying love can be withdrawn anytime you don’t measure up? I’d had enough.

A few months later, I was sitting in a darkened theater in Los Angeles, listening to the Dalai Lama speak in person. He was not what I’d expected. I thought he’d be very solemn, but instead his eyes twinkled and he giggled a lot. Like a big kid in colorful robes. By then I was about six months pregnant, and I sat with my hand on my belly, hoping my son could hear, too.

At one point, he said he’d had all these incredible teachers. All these wise men and countless scholars and spiritual advisors, but he’d learned more about compassion from his mother than anyone else. Suddenly my face was wet with tears. I figured I had three more months to really lock in. Turns out like most worthwhile things it’s a daily practice, but it was good I got the memo when I did, late or not.

The other thing that happened is my birth plan. All the books I read said to create one. Envision your birth, mama. See yourself, strong and supple, warrior-like, calling on your ancestors, drawing up all the strength from Mother Earth. Or something. I dunno, I got so many videos and emails and people telling me it was going to be so easy for me with my open hips from all the yoga. I was just going to squat down and push the baby out. I’d smile, but somewhere in the back of my head, I was scared.

When you’re a yoga teacher in Los Angeles and you get pregnant and it’s 2005, people send you videos of women by the ocean’s edge, ecstatically pushing their babies out while dolphins frolic in the background. Someone plays a sitar nearby. They send videos of women in birthing pools with their doulas and their man-bunned husbands there, rooting them on, while they push the baby out and bring it to their breast. They say you shouldn’t cut the cord for forty-five minutes. They tell you to freeze the placenta, to eat the placenta, to paint with it.

(I’m all for home-births and doulas and midwives, by the way. Just saying, the videos were a lot.)

I was having my son in the hospital, but I wanted low lights and no drugs and I was bringing a playlist and I was going to be doing yoga the whole time, and also I wanted NO DRUGS, and I was going to bring a pregnancy ball to bounce on and I needed to be able to move and breathe any way that felt right, and I might decide to take a hot shower at some point, and also NO ONE SHOULD OFFER ME DRUGS, and I wanted to be able to squat and breathe and listen to my body. Everyone signed off on my plan — my doctor, the nurses, the hospital.

The day came, though, and it did not go exactly as I planned, which was really weird because I wrote the whole thing down. I envisioned it for months, and manifested it and everyone signed off on it. I planned my birth down to the last moment, so it took a lot of audacity for it not to go the way I said it should.

Instead — and again, I’m going to give you the abridged version — things went as I planned them for twelve hours. I was having some back labor (baby pressing on my tailbone) but I was managing to switch positions and breathe through contractions. Then the shift changed, and the amazing nurse who’d been cheering me on (and who had clearly read my birth plan and understood the freaking assignment) had to leave, and a new nurse came in.

Immediately, the new nurse was not impressed with the whole NO DRUGS, no intervention vibe. She looked at me and she looked at my chart and she looked at the monitor, and she said, “Do you want me to get you a little something to take the edge off the pain? You have at least four more hours to go.”

Not sure I can explain what a contraction feels like to anyone who has never had a contraction, but maybe imagine — you know what? I don’t even want to do this to you. It’s intense, because you are BRINGING FORTH LIFE, and said life is coming through a very small opening, and your hip and pelvic bones have to give way, and your child’s skull bones have to give way — thus the “soft spot” — and there’s just a lot of giving way and surrender and trust in yourself and in anything you can hold onto, and in your birth team.

The thing you want to do when a contraction is happening is breathe, and somewhere in your brain remember that no feeling is forever. This is just your body preparing. You try not to fight it. But what you do not do, at any cost, is start thinking in terms of hours. Or minutes. You focus on one breath at a time. Suddenly, it was like a horror movie where the sound gets slowed down.

That’s all I could hear — FFFFFOOOOUUUUURRRR MMMMMMOOOORRRRREEEE HHHHHOOOOOUUUUURRRSSSS.

I’m not going to blame the nurse. Maybe things would have taken a turn regardless. I just know that the energy shifted when the shift changed. I went from feeling confident, like I had it and could do it, to feeling panicked. I said yes to the drugs, and she raced off to get them, and my now ex husband said hey, I don’t care if you take the drugs, but don’t let her be the reason. You’ve been doing great. You’ve been saying for nine months you don’t want drugs. She came in here after twelve hours of you handling this, and screwed with your head, that’s all I’m saying.

When she came back I was mid-contraction and I Linda-Blaired at her that I didn’t want any fucking drugs and hadn’t she read my fucking birth plan? I’ve never spoken to anyone like that in my life, except for any man who’s ever tried to overpower me, which is sadly too many. Other than them and this nurse, never. Side note: literally no one has to be polite during a contraction, this is a hard and fast rule.

Nonetheless, my labor stalled. Those four hours she’d mentioned? No progress. None. Zip, nada, nothing. Contractions every three minutes, lasting a minute each time, but I was still at 6 centimeters, and now, with every contraction my blood pressure was plummeting, and my son’s heart rate was rising. My doctor called. It was time for pitocin, she was hopeful it would get things moving again. Maybe that would be enough. She wasn’t liking what was happening for either one of us. I trusted her, so I said okay.

I’m not going to take you through the play-by-play. I don’t love to tell this story in case anyone reading is pregnant. The important thing to know is that I am here and my son is here and we are both okay. I will tell you there was a respiratory team in the room by the time he arrived. I will say there were alarms blaring throughout the rest of the labor, things were touch-and-go for both of us, and at one point, when I asked that nurse for reassurance, she looked at the monitor and said, “Well, I don’t see anything that tells me your baby is going to die.”

That is when I asked her to leave the room and not come back.

Later, after he arrived and did not cry the way babies do in all the movies, after the respiratory team took him a few feet away and it was me who was crying, “Is he okay? Is he okay?” in a voice I did not recognize, after they cleared his lungs and he let out a sound that was more like a victory yell than a cry and they put him on my chest, after they grabbed a medication off the tray to stop me from bleeding out — a medication they lock away in Louisiana now, so some nurse has to take off running and hope they make it back in time — after we were finally home, days later, and I knew we were okay, after all of that, I read something.

There’s a Swahili proverb that at the time of birth, the mother’s grave opens for an instant.

When I read that, I felt it in my soul. I spent the last twelve hours of my labor moving back and forth across the veil. This life, this sense I had that we, the living, are so solid, that we are planted here so firmly, had gone. It never came back again. At a certain point, my prayer became, let us go together. Whichever way we’re going, please, let it be together.

Somewhere in all of that I realized my plans were so funny. Funny, as in, throw your head back and laugh funny. All of it. All the years I’d spent trying so hard to be perfect, thinking the brass rings meant anything, or that being good would save me from heartache, the peeing on sticks and taking my temperature and boiling tea and consulting Maori giants and writing a birth plan and every last thing was hilarious and innocent and heartbreaking.

I might as well take my written up plans down to the beach and yell them out to the ocean. Here are my plans for you, Ocean! Here’s how the tides should go this week! Hey! Wtf? Why aren’t you listening?

Nineteen years and two people who call me Mom. I’ve taught them the most basic things because those are the things I know. Probably the best of those is how it feels to be loved and cherished all the way down to your toes, just for being you.

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