Love Will: Encountering Divine Love in Postpartum PTSD
Love Will
Love will obliterate you
If you let it
You should
Let it crack you open
Unravel you entirely
Wrest the key from your closed fist
You will be beside yourself
You will be beyond yourself
You will be reborn
I was around 14 weeks pregnant when I felt this poem drop out of the hemlock trees near my garden and rebound through my mind. I was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window. Despite the ordinariness of the moment, I knew right away it was an prescient poem, come to visit me from some other realm. Oddly enough, my first instinct was that it would be my birth song. I quickly dismissed the notion. I was planning a beautiful homebirth in which I would emerge as a new mother, triumphant and exuberant, and, most importantly, whole (ha). My next thought was that this poem must really be for my husband. Surely he was the one in need of a transformative encounter with Divine Love, not me (haha).
Still, I understood the significance of receiving the poem, even if the meaning remained an enigma. I kept it close to my heart for many months, like a seed planted in the depths, waiting for its time.
When I learned near the end of my pregnancy that I would have no choice but to have a cesarean section (my literal worst fear), the poem taunted me. No no no no! My ego said. This cannot happen. And while I may have looked calm walking into the operating room, the truth is inwardly I was kicking and screaming. I was beside myself with dread and the desire to escape my destiny on that table. My ego knew that to submit to that knife would mean annihilation. You probably know there is nothing an ego dreads more.
And yet I walked in and laid myself down under the knife.
Obliterated was an apt description. Broken in body, crushed in spirit. My experience in the hospital was even worse than I had anticipated (and believe me I had pretty low expectations). I felt violated, humiliated, forsaken. I couldn’t bear to be there, so I checked myself out of the hospital a little over 24 hours after my surgery. I packed up the smashed pieces of my heart and carried them home with my newborn baby.
I had lost my dream of homebirth, my place in the natural birth community, my healthy, whole body, and that blissful ignorance of the sometimes harsh reality of birth. I unraveled. In the next weeks and months, I felt the dark veil of postpartum PTSD on me. I suffered from nightmares and panic attacks. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without sobbing. Seeing social media posts of homebirthing mothers made me sweat and shake and feel like vomiting. Seeing social media posts about cesarean sections did the same thing. For days, weeks, and months, I would sob while I pushed my baby in the stroller, beneath the same trees that gave me that fateful poem, replaying my experience over and over, sure of the injustice and meaninglessness of my suffering. I felt the grief, anger, desperation, and terrible, terrible loneliness of postpartum PTSD. It wracked me to my core.
And yet, I had faith that my pain wouldn’t last forever, and that a meaning (if one even existed) would come in its own time. So I continued to walk my path, even when I couldn’t see where I was going through the darkness. Eventually I felt that the trees themselves were ushering me forward, pointing the way to new morning.
One day, about nine months later, I was walking outside on my usual path, and to my surprise I realized the veil had lifted. It was over. I survived. PTSD feels like living in a nightmare playing on an endless loop. It’s always playing in the background. Sometimes you “tune in” to the channel in your mind, and sometimes you can ignore it, but it’s always on. So you can imagine my astoundment and relief when I realized that after nine long months that channel was finally off!
At this point in my journey I was able to look beyond myself and into the deeper meaning of my experience. I learned suffering can be an opportunity to encounter the transformative power of Divine Love. I came to understand that, despite my ego’s stubborn protestations, my soul chose this experience. My homebirth turned c-section was an opportunity for me to allow Divine Love to accomplish its work in me, to reckon with the parts of me that were holding me back from becoming the woman and the mother I was destined to become, and yes, to let those parts of me pass away under the surgeon’s knife. My brave and willing soul chose to walk this difficult path as a way toward real wholeness. It said yes to this sacred opportunity. Like any true spiritual transformation, my journey into motherhood took me deep down the path of annihilation. Like a caterpillar dissolving into mush inside her cocoon, I died in a very real-to-me sense.
If you let it, suffering will cause the death of ego. This is part of why it is such a painful experience, and why it feels nearly impossible to embrace. Our ego makes us think that we will not survive its destruction, hence the “kicking and screaming” we tend to experience. If we trust in something beyond ourselves, we will see that not only can we survive the death of ego, we can experience a type of rebirth on the other side.
Sometimes an experience of suffering offers us the key to a door that would otherwise remain closed to us. We can choose whether to walk through it. The door may open to a dark and lonely path, but it will lead us to a precious treasure.
Over the threshold of my door was indeed a dark and lonely path. Stepping forward required a pouring out of myself, body and soul. Forced to surrender my self-centered desires, my hopes and dreams, my autonomy, even what I considered my wholeness, I would come face to face with whatever part of me might endure beyond the fire.
I entered into a paradox: The less of me I cling to, the more I can embody Divine Love.
This is the treasure I found. The freedom of knowing I can exist beyond the loss of self, and the joy of knowing my willingness to lose it. Not because I wanted to suffer, not because I “needed to be taught a lesson”, but because some deep part of me was willing to encounter Divine Love this way. To be transformed.
At one time my scar was a painful reminder of my brokenness, now it is proof of my willingness. A permanent reminder that I have been changed by Love, that Divine Love has touched me to my deepest core, body and soul. My personal stigmata, showing me the holiness of a willing soul.
Dear reader, I hope you let Love do its work in you, no matter what it costs your ego. I hope you let Love obliterate you. I hope you walk through that open door, even if you do it kicking and screaming, like I did. Be assured, you can go kicking and screaming into an encounter with Divine Love and still be blessed. Be assured, you can walk the path of annihilation and come out on the other side reborn.
Blessings to you.
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