9. The Beauty of Uncertainty

This post is for the birth trauma survivors and people who live with anxiety. I’ve found we can have a harder time with the uncertainty of birth than others. 

For birth trauma survivors, we struggle with the unknown because we’ve experienced the worst of it.

For people with anxiety, we struggle with the unknown because it’s easy for us to imagine the worst of it.

There have been many points in my life where I wished I could fast forward, make sure everything worked out okay or at least find out how it all worked out, and then blip back into the present moment with my new found knowledge. I thought if I could just squint hard enough, the future would glimmer out ahead of me and I could memorize all the important parts.

At its heart, I think this obsession with the future and all the “what ifs” it holds is an attempt to protect ourselves. If we can look and find out that everything is fine, then great. We don’t have to worry! And if we peek into the future and see that it’s not going well, we can at least know what’s coming and try to prepare. 

But of course, we can’t actually do these things, and would we really want to?

One of the (HARD but) beautiful parts of the birth journey is that it is mysterious. We can’t know exactly how it’s going to unfold, and this is true even if we have slightly more “control” that we typically do, as with a planned induction or planned surgical birth. We can’t know exactly when things will happen, how we’ll feel, or what it will be like to meet our baby for that first time. 

Most importantly of all, we don’t know who we will be in the moment.

What if, instead of being anxiety-inducing, that was the most powerful thing? What if we, and how we show up in that space, were the most powerful things about our birth? What if we knew that the mystery of the future contained an even more powerful and profound version of ourselves?

What would it be like to move through our pregnancies knowing that the coolest versions of ourselves were waiting just up ahead?

What if the unknown of birth, and everything it could reveal in us, turns out to be the most beautiful thing about it?

I don’t say this to minimize birth trauma or to promise that everything will work out “for the best.” I do believe though that birth, no matter what it looks like, has the potential to reveal things about ourselves, our babies, and our lives, that we might never have discovered otherwise. Sometimes this happens in the lead up to birth, sometimes during birth, and sometimes afterward, especially if our birth looked very different from how we imagined it. We might find deep meaning in our labors, but we also might have to make deep meaning from our experiences afterward.

Dr. Christine Sterling said something (on Instagram maybe?) about how our babies each teach us something specific, and it’s stuck with me. When I think about my own birth stories and the ways my kids entered the world, I really do feel like they each gave me something I really needed, changed me in a way that allowed me to be the best parent for them, yes, but also the best version of myself. Sometimes what they give us is easy to receive, but other times it takes more work. While I would never say birth trauma is a “gift,” I can tell you from experiencing it myself and from working with clients who’ve gone through it, it does tend to give us some damn good clarity about what’s important to us and why. 

So the next time you find yourself spiraling, wondering what your birth will be like, maybe you can give yourself the space to ask a second question, not to be answered but instead to be marveled at: “But what will I be like?”