The privilege of a calm mind

I am a jellyfish.

When every road feels traveled
And we get lost in struggle
When the whole world’s unraveling
Well, it’s just fear messing with us
- “Just Fear,” Dan Mangum

There have been a handful of times in my life when I have experienced such intense emotional distress that it becomes physical. When my mind and heart ache so badly that existing as myself in that moment feels impossible.

One of those times was just after an abortion when I was 17. I experienced it several times in 2014 during my divorce, including one time when I had what I did not realize at the time was a panic attack in the parking lot of the building where I work. My vision became spotty, I couldn’t breathe or unclench my fists, and thought/kinda hoped I might be dying.

The most recent experience was this past weekend.

*****

I planned a home birth when pregnant with my youngest child, Charlie. On the advice of my fantastic midwife, I signed myself and my then-husband up for hypnobirthing classes with a sweet woman called Jill.

After two hospital births featuring epidurals, I was terrified of a drug-free childbirth in the old parsons house we were renting about thirty minutes from the nearest hospital and was arming myself with all the natural childbirth information I could find.

I admit I was initially skeptical but, turns out, hypnobirthing worked better than I ever thought it would, for more than Charlie’s birth.

To say that giving birth naturally in the living room of my home is the greatest physical and mental feat I've ever accomplished isn't really an exaggeration. Unless I lift a car off someone in the next couple of decades or actually cure myself of this pesky Borderline Personality Disorder, choosing to naturally push a human out of my body on the same spot his dad and I binge-watched The Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad is at the top. Take that, Negan. I’ll step to your barbed wire bat any time.

Not only was the experience miraculous because the end result was my sweet son, Charlie Max, one of the great loves of my life, but the entire ordeal taught me what my mind and body are capable of if I let go of fear. Or lean into fear, depending on how you choose to look at it. Because as counterintuitive as it seems at the outset, I am realizing that leaning into fear is the best way to LET. IT. GO.

As snow sifted down through the inky Pennsylvania night, March 1st tiptoed quietly into March 2nd and the labor pains intensified, I imagined my heavy, swollen body slipping gently beneath tropical ocean waves, like scuba diving without the equipment.

Wrapped in the imaginary cozy blanket of warm water, my exhausted, aching body felt weightless. Like Dorothy opening the front door of her crash-landed house onto the panorama of Oz, my bedroom dropped from around my clenched body and suddenly I was floating in an underwater world of my brain’s creation.

Moving through translucent streaks of white sunlight, I mermaided past schools of fish and elegant sea turtles, glided around dancing seaweed, and multi-colored coral, letting the pain dilate until it was everywhere and then nowhere.

I am the wave but also the ocean. The wave returns to the ocean which becomes another wave that returns to the ocean. Wave. Ocean. Wave. Ocean. Ocean. Ocean.

Like lowering your ears underwater when lying in the tub, the voices of my husband and the midwife receded into ocean oblivion. For hours I was somersaulting in the deep, swimming gracefully through blue-green water.

So vivid was my waterworld that years later, when trying a virtual reality headset at a museum in Philadelphia, I would flash briefly to those overnight hours my body was racked with pain, bent over my bed in the parsonage in Hublersburg, while my mind ran away; thoughts traveling tropical until I knew it was time and, in between contractions, raced down the stairs and leaped into the pool the midwife had set up in the living room.

Although the hospital births of my two older children were magnificent and indisputably life-altering, in retrospect, after the home birth, it all seemed disappointingly institutional and impersonal. Ushered from one high price room to the next, a fleet of nurses poking and prodding me at all hours, chuckling condescendingly at my shy desire to attempt to give birth without an epidural. "Nobody wins a medal for a natural childbirth, honey. Get the shot.”

I didn’t win a medal after Charlie slid from my insides into the pool of warm water, but I did gain incredible respect for what my body can accomplish if I trust it to do its job.

I trust that these shivers will ease up on my spine
Allow myself the privilege of a calm mind, now and then
I just want to feel the sunshine. - “Just Fear,” Dan Mangum

*****

When we met, Cory was in recent remission from bladder cancer and still needed to get screenings from his oncologist every six months. This horrifying procedure called a cystoscopy involves passing a thick, tube-like telescope called a cystoscope through the urethra and into the bladder to check for a return of the cancer. For obvious reasons involving what to Cory must have felt like the opposite of pushing a child from your vagina, he dreaded getting the procedure so I volunteered to go with him.

As we sat in the exam room waiting for his doctor to retrieve him for the procedure, I noticed Cory, who had already taken a Vicodin and an Ativan, was shaking. I wrapped my arms around his neck, brought our heads together, and began whispering in his ear.

Close your eyes. Forget where you are. Just feel my arms around you, my head touching yours, my words in your ear. Breathe with me. In… Hold it… Now let it out… Deep breath in, hold it, now out.

After about five minutes of breathing deeply together, I felt the room drop away the same way it had when I was in labor with Charlie except this time I was experiencing it with another person. Remembering the relief of the ocean, speaking barely above a whisper I told Cory to keep breathing and began creating my waterworld for him.

At the risk of sounding schmaltzy, it got spiritual and it got - wait for it… Sexy. A sexy cancer screening? I know. But there we were, breathing deeply, foreheads touching, arms wrapped around each other imagining ourselves in an alternate universe together, and, look, I’m going to go ahead and say that there may have been some pre-procedure kissing.

We had ourselves a spiritual-sexy experience right there next to the jar of giant popsicle sticks and the velcro-y blood pressure cuff. Whatever it took to get his mind off that big ol’ cystoscope.

Later, after the procedure, he claimed I turned him into a dolphin and he’s never experienced anything like the twenty minutes we spent underwater in the doctor’s exam room. Seven years later, it remains a singular experience in our relationship.

*****

I guess it should come as no surprise that on Saturday while driving my kids to their dad’s house, I became a jellyfish.

Ever watched jellyfish do their thing? It’s mesmerizing. Tranquil, translucent ghost-aliens with soft, gelatinous bodies glimmering and shimmering in the dark depths. Flowing, graceful movements. They have no brain, heart, bones, or eyes. Jellyfish are 95% water. Water swimming in water.

Driving the kids to their dad’s house is always an anxious time for me, and this time was particularly difficult for reasons that should remain private. I was sitting in the front passenger seat of our minivan, The Gray Lady, while Cory drove. As I contemplated the year I have had as well as all that had occurred on that day alone not to mention the difficult months ahead, I willed myself not to cry.

“I don’t know how to live like this anymore, I don’t know how to be me in this life.”

A massive shift needed to occur in my perception of everything that has happened, and is still happening, to continue to function as a parent, a partner, and a human.

My head hurting, my body aching, I rolled down the window and opened the sunroof. I reached my hand out the sunroof toward the blue sky and the minivan dropped away.

My skin felt translucent, like a jellyfish. Heart beating, blood pumping through my veins, brain vibrating red survival mode alerts to the rest of my body. Like being in labor with Charlie, my body was in so much pain I had to go somewhere else and, once again, water was my respite.

In the same way that something - observing your own children, for example - can be so beautiful it hurts, sometimes pain can be so intense it almost alchemizes into beauty. Proof positive you’re alive and experiencing earthquake emotions so bone-rattling you are intensely aware of existing in the present moment.

I am a jellyfish. No brain, heart, bones, or eyes. I am alive and existing and that is enough for now.

Me. The blue sky. Energy. I am alive. Alive is beautiful. So beautiful it hurts. Pain is being alive. Alive is beautiful.

Full circle.

I recently learned that certain types of jellyfish are responsible for bringing little bits of nutrients from the depths of the sea all the way up to the surface of the water. They leave nibbles of nutrients along the way for other ocean creatures as they ascend.

I am a jellyfish.

From the deep blue-black, I push upward, rising to the surface with newfound wisdom I try to share with others as we search for the sunlight.

IWNDWYT - Day 31