By the time I reconnected with my mother around age 13 through visits, I had lost nearly all of my Spanish, and most of our connection. I struggled to know what to talk about with her, so we mostly just chatted superficially. But there is one thing I heard repeatedly from her.
“Mija, I almost died when you were born!!”
After 9 other pregnancies, her uterus ruptured and she had to be hospitalized two months before I was due. She was terrified of a surgery, of hospitals, and initially refused a c-section.
“But, ” she would say, ” the doctor begged me. He said Lupe, pleeease. If you don’t have this surgery, you can die, and your baby can die too. And he had tears in his eyes!”
She was so touched by that.
Sometimes when she would tell this story she would say she agreed to have the surgery so as not worry him.
When I think about this story, it is a potent reminder of the capacity we have to share love, kindness and touch someone deeply.
I wonder if that doctor had any idea how impactful his care was in that moment.
That she would tell this story for the next thirty years.
That it would be a primary memory of her daughter that she’d have taken away/need to give up.
And a default topic for reconnection in a sea of uncomfortable silence.
It used to frustrate me because I wished for something more comforting from her, not to repeatedly hear that I was a burden. A source of terror.
I felt it as a finger jabbing into an already sore wound of our disconnect. She hardly knew me now, who I had grown to be. And instead she often only recounted this negative experience.
But after I learned about her successful unassisted home births, and having my own sweet home birth experiences, I have more understanding. I can sense her possible shock, disorientation and denial of her powerful birthing body’s incapacity. And I see the courage in her choice to surrender to the foreign landscape of an American hospital.
And the possibility that perhaps she wasn’t just telling me a story of her dramatic fear but also of her strength
and willingness to move through it, for love.
A mother’s love.
So much depends on how we tell the story.
(This is also why when I work with clients, we process and move through what was traumatic, but we always look for the resource, the resilience. It’s essential to have these in our stories too)