Meaning and the Post-It Note, part 2*

A post-it note has been following me around my house. I’ll think I’ve set it somewhere to scan and save for later, and then I find it somewhere else. I completely forget about it, and then it pops up. Even though I’ve finally found a place for it and kept it in its place, it still pops up in my mind occasionally. I am grateful that it keeps reappearing. Its message was important for me when it was written, and I think it is perhaps even more vital now.

What is this piece of paper, you ask?** It contains Brice’s scrawled record of my contractions during the last couple hours of labor when I gave birth to Addra.*** I see you scratching your head. I hear you thinking, This was your all-important post-it? I thought for sure it held your checking account number or your safety deposit box lock code or at least your childhood shot record. Nope. Just a list of times and durations of contractions.

So why its importance? I shall tell you. For those of you who don’t know, labor with Coriel was… hard. (Har har, hard labor, har har.) But truly, it was difficult and painful and I struggled to make meaning of it. I felt like I had made the right decision for our family (birth center, no medication, la di da), but I lingered over it. I felt like I had failed at something that was immensely important to me. It wasn’t the labor or the pain—it was how I had dealt with it that made me unsatisfied. So when it came to Addra’s birth, I was trying to do everything I could to make this experience different.

Bottom line: My emotional memory of my first labor was essentially unending pain, and that was the story that my heart told the rest of me.

But let’s have a reality check here. There were periods through which I dozed. Hours, even. There was a time sitting in a tub with Brice reading Ella Enchanted to me (nice, light labor reading, by the way) that I can barely remember because I was mostly or completely asleep. There was at least a minute or two break between contractions for almost the entire labor. This was not 16 hours of ongoing pain. You don’t sleep or rest through 16 hours of pain.

So while intellectually I knew that I had really experienced small bouts of difficulty with at least equal bouts of rest, all I could see was the pain.

Fast forward: I didn’t want to look back on my second labor the same way. I wanted pain to take its proper place in the experience (present but not all encompassing). So I told Brice that one of his most important jobs was to keep a log of my contractions that I could look back on and see that they were really just small moments.

When Addra was born, something miraculous happened to me. I remembered the pain, but I also remembered that it wasn’t always there. In the end I didn’t actually need the record (although it was fun to look back at, and I think that requesting it was an important part of the process for me). And most amazing of all was that the pain of the previous labor was washed away. I knew that I had been miserable about it, but I didn’t feel it anymore. It was gone.

And now this post-it note reminds me that between periods of pain or sadness or ugliness, there are plenty of times of joy and laughter and goodness. No, this is not exactly a new sentiment, but the bad stuff really is pretty small most of the time. But when you only focus on the contractions, all you see is pain. When you only see the things you’ve done wrong or the suffering you’ve endured, the meaning of life is suffering. But when you see something else, when you see the in-between times, the meaning of life is joy.****

*I bet you thought I’d completely forgotten to follow up on part 1, huh?

**Incidentally, I’m always trying to decide how to punctuate that particular type of sentence. “What is this piece of paper? you ask.” “What is this piece of paper, you ask?” “What is this piece of paper, you ask.” I’m sure my Chicago Manual of Style would tell me, but I’d have to drag it down from the attic to find out. So I’ll have to continue angsting over it instead.

***Please note: Despite my obsession with mentioning pregnancy and labor (and despite the tiny bladder of the previous post), no, I am really not pregnant.

****(Or, okay, let’s be honest—it’s at least a lot better than constant suffering, even if it’s not always joy.)