Two Truths
The day my child was born was the same day that D*nald Tru^p would become president of the United States.
She was due to come in late October, but the date came and went.
I went to vote early, and waited and waited.
We went to the hospital on Monday evening. I labored through the night in what I can only describe now as a 12-hour blackout punctuated by key moments:
the moment I regretted eating that cheeseburger for dinner
the moment I released my high hopes for my birth plan and asked for interventions
the moment of complete surrender into the hospital bed as exhaustion and overwhelm claimed my body
the moment they woke me up to start pushing
the moment my partner told me we have a girl baby
the moment I heard her voice for the first time.
Her voice was so powerful, so strong. She came in like a herald of a changing era.
By the time it was Tuesday evening, we were in the recovery room. I was crying because the nurses had taken her to the nursery; I wanted them to take her, and I also didn’t want to be apart from her.
I didn’t know what to do with this conflict, and that was my first really conscious practice of holding two truths at the same time. So I decided to move – I got out of bed and walked slowly to the bathroom, and looked at this new mother for the first time.
When I came out, I looked at the TV and saw that he had won Florida, and I knew that we weren’t going to get the election result we wanted. I asked my partner to turn off the television, then tried to sleep as I sensed everything shifting – hope and certainty slipped into fear and anxiety.
Too tired to move this time, I let it be.
When I woke up the next morning, she was in a bassinet next to an east-exposed window, sleeping in the glow in a slow-rising sun. A new day and a new being draped in possibility, yet everyone I knew felt so powerless and so confused.
Two profound and conflicting truths that somehow had to co-exist.
What do we do with such stark contrast?
What if we just to let it be, and be with it?
Sometimes there’s a conflict and you act, and other times you surrender to its unfolding.
What a stellar practice-ground parenting is for this. At times, parenting is thrilling, like watching her learn to read new words. Other times are terrifying, like when she learned how to flip upside down on the monkey bars. And then there’s the utterly mundane, like the nightly bedtime routine.
Sometimes, it’s all these things all at once.
Time is accelerated AND snail-paced.
I feel like a stranger to myself AND the most me I’ve ever been.
She looks a lot like me AND quite like her father.
Simultaneously.
Parenting (along with other “calls” I’ve answered before and since) has taught me to stand firmly at the intersection of past and future; of reality and imagination; of darkness and light.
Intersecting the binary and letting it explode so that now there are a thousand, million, billion options that we had not thought of until this very moment. Knowing this, feeling this and experiencing it every day since that hopeful, dreadful moment in November six years ago – it’s a superpower.
When she was a newborn, I recall thinking that I would never be able to take a leisurely shower again. Never have dinner with my partner at a normal time. Never, ever sleep again. Even as those luxuries return to me, I am faced with a whole new and ever-emerging set of changes.
So I am learning to be here now.
Because in this place, there no never. There is only change.
“The only lasting truth is change.”