Inside the Threshold, Hating It

• The twelve days my body refused to go into real labor (turns out my child was the one running the timeline, not me)

• What it felt like when my contractions went from eleven minutes apart to zero, with no breaks in between

• The version of me at two weeks postpartum vs. the version of me at two months, and what actually shifted

• The exact sentence my doula said that did more than every “it will pass” text combined

I’m writing this two months after having a baby, the little guy asleep in the next room, the house quiet in the specific way it only gets when you've stopped trying to do anything else.

I want to tell you about two thresholds that worked me in ways I did not love, but very much needed. The first was birth. The second came right after, and lasted longer than I expected.

The first threshold: twelve days in labor

My labor started and stopped for twelve days. On and off, on and off, my body rehearsing something it wasn’t ready to commit to yet. I was impatient (to say the least). I wanted it to be happening already, fully, finally. Looking back, I see that my child was teaching me something about his timing versus mine, and I was not a willing student.

When my baby was finally ready to come earthside, it happened very fast. Gentle contractions went from eleven minutes apart to zero at a high intensity. Zero space between them. No breaks. It felt like a freight train moving through my body, and I could not get it to slow down, could not get it to stop, could not do anything but be inside it.

I became something feral. I was literally pulling at my hair, desperate for any relief, any handhold, trying desperately to find my breath. I remember briefly wondering if I could tear the tile out of my shower walls in an effort to counteract the quaking of my body. My partner and birth team were there, encouraging and reassuring me. But I was in my own ceremony with terror and control, because at that moment every coping mechanism I had walked in with was gone. My brain didn’t know what to do with what my body was doing.

But then, all of a sudden, my body was pushing my baby and he emerged from me like a cannonball…and I could breathe again. The terror dissipated into thin air, all at once, the way a storm ends and you stand in the sudden quiet not quite believing it. I was in a new world and my baby was in it with me. It was incredible and mythic and euphoric. What a miracle.

^{Mere seconds into the relief of being on the other side of birth’s intensity with my babe}

The second threshold: newborn trenches

..and it turns out that the freight train of unrelenting intensity wasn’t finished.

If you’ve had a baby, you know the newborn trenches are a lot. Sleepless nights. A high needs little human in your arms. A body still healing from what it just did. An entirely new lifetime starting up around you while you’re still standing in the wreckage of the old one. With each baby, you are remade, and you have to find your footing again from scratch, because a lot of your old coping mechanisms won’t fit this new body, this new house, this new version of your days.

I felt trapped, I’ll just say it plainly. I felt resistant to all the truths of the moment, but this genie that was out of the bottle and was not going back in. I had a baby. I was up at night, every night. It was what it was, and some part of me kept wishing I were somewhere else, some other version of this, anywhere but exactly here. This lasted many weeks.

But then, at around 7 weeks into it, something shifted. Not dramatically, just a quiet return. I started to find my footing again. My confidence. My consistency. My trust in myself that I’ve got this. My willingness to surrender, once more, to whatever this is asking of me.

^{Us with a new, more settled nervous system in our postpartum cocoon}

The Threshold Underneath the Threshold

This is not only about birth and babies.

It’s about every time we end up in the birth canal of some transformation we didn’t ask for, or didn’t picture looking like the way it’s unfolding.

The job loss that becomes the opening. The diagnosis that rearranges everything. The relationship break you didn’t see coming. The move, the ending, the becoming, that we didn’t choose the shape of and can’t control the pace of once it starts.

There's a particular kind of suffering that can happen inside these moments, and it isn't only the hard thing itself. It's the wanting it to be different. The wishing you were somewhere else, in some other version of this, while knowing there's no door out except through whatever is actually happening to you right now. That wanting doesn't make you weak, or ungrateful, or bad at this. It might just mean you're awake to exactly where you are.

In those moments, every tool we walked across the threshold with can stop working. We can become feral, grasping, desperate for someone, anyone, to make it stop.

During the early newborn weeks, well-meaning people kept telling me it would pass. They were right, and it didn’t exactly help in the moment. Something in me would tighten every time I heard it, because it landed like a request to hurry up and feel differently than I did.

What actually helped was my beloved postpartum doula. When I told her how trapped I felt, she didn’t try to talk me out of it or move me toward the other side of it. She just said, “I hear you. That sounds really hard and I get it. It makes sense that you feel that way.” That was the whole thing. No fix, no timeline, no reframe. Just someone confirming that what I was feeling was real, and that feeling it didn’t mean I was doing something wrong.

I think that might be the actual help for anyone standing in their own birth canal of transformation right now. Not someone promising you it will pass, even when it’s true. Someone willing to stay with you while it doesn’t, yet, and tell you that makes sense.

So if you’re in it, I’m not going to tell you it will pass (even though it will). I’m going to tell you this instead: it makes sense that you feel this way. You’re not failing the moment by struggling inside it. You’re just inside it.

And the only way out is through it. Every time.