It is a painful process, this birthing, not just for the one giving birth but for the one being born. Confusing, too, when one’s safe, warm home begins to constrict and pressure builds and the tightness causes the heart to beat quickly. After a time, there is release and one thinks perhaps it is over and settles back into comfort. And then the heaviness, the squeezing, begins to build again.

It is good to remember. As one being birthed, I cannot control the process. All I can do is submit to the pains of this one who loves and longs to know me and is laboring to bring me from my small, dark, comfortable world into a place at first startlingly bright and strange, but a place in which I can begin to see and know and love this one who loved me first.

Photo by Katie Watts