***Read at your own risk.  I’m rating this entire post “R” for strong language, dark thoughts, and mildly hilarious mentions of adult toys.  I’m unloading a lot here. You’ve been warned.

I knew long ago that I would need some sort of celebratory maternal support as I neared the end of this pregnancy. This is my third baby, but it’s my first natural/homebirth, and I always have a great big fear of the unknown. I decided that a Blessingway-style party could be the perfect thing to help me gather some support and wisdom as stared down the mouth of an animal I have no first-hand experience with.  Well, the timing of the party could not have been any better, because last week I started to drift into a very dark place filled with anxiety, stress, and an overwhelming urge to jump ship.

It all started on Sunday night when I realized just how much homework I had due that week.  By Tuesday, I needed to prepare full GROUP presentations for TWO classes, along with many chapters of homework, PLUS the beginning of a 2,000 word marketing plan.  This was all for the second week of classes.  I have never, in all my academic career, had that much homework due at once, let alone one week after classes start, and I swear I would not have signed up for these classes if I knew it was going to be this type of workload.  And the best part?  The school bookstore called to say that screwed up my order, and my book orders weren’t coming in until Week 3 of classes – even though they were already over two weeks late, meaning I am going to have to catch up on THREE WEEKS of homework all at once by the time the books finally come in.

Panic was already forming when I got a late-night email offering me a job that I applied for a few weeks ago.  The offer came with a VERY tight deadline, meaning I had only days to start producing work.  I also had other paid work piling up, and Julesy picked this – of all weeks – to start potty learning, which I could NOT, in good conscience, ignore.  Between taking him on potty trips every 90 minutes of the day, I tried to form a plan of attack to tackle the mountains of work piling up around me.  As all of this is going on, I officially hit full-term, meaning that my baby could technically be born at any time – right in the middle of all this insanity.

Cue. Mental. Breakdown.

Wednesday night, as class was ending I called my husband to get one specific credit card number from him so I could quickly order a book I’d found online since the bookstore didn’t have mine yet.  I was waiting for him to email me the credit card number while my class teammates were all standing around me in their own dramatic panic about who was getting assigned which questions for next week’s group homework assignment. As my nerves started catching on fire with them prattling in my ear, my husband calls me to say he sent me the info, but because he wasn’t paying attention to what I was asking for, he sent me the wrong info.

On any other day, it might have been a small miscommunication, but in that moment, him sending me the wrong info was the straw that broke my whole back.  I started seething expletives into the phone as a full-on panic attack ensued.  My hands began shaking, my mind began rolling a thousand miles a minute, and the increasing volume from my bickering teammates caused me to loudly begin asserting that “Everything will be fine when I get this fucking card number from my fucking husband if I don’t fucking kill him first!!!”

That was the floodgates opening.  After that, there was no turning back.  My mental condition quickly deteriorated into a sequence of panicked, desperate thoughts.

These people need homework from me.  I have no book.  I am about to have a baby.  Oh my god, I cannot have a baby.  I CAN’T HAVE A BABY!!!  I have deadlines. People need things from me.  If I don’t give them what they need, everything will be horrible.  The earth will fall off its axis – OR – even worse!  People might think I’m a flake and I’ll never get work again!  I am not emotionally or mentally equipped to give birth right now, and bad, bad things are going to happen if I go into labor.  This will be a disaster.  Everything is a disaster.

I came home and started screaming at my husband about how I can’t count on him to do the littlest of things for me, and if he couldn’t send me the right credit card number, then HOW would he help me through this birth?  I decided he wasn’t going to help me, because I wasn’t going to give him the chance.  I told him I wanted to be taken to the nearest hospital, put under general anesthesia, and have the baby taken out via cesarean.

And I sobbed.  I laid in bed with tissue piling up around me and I sobbed.  The Husband didn’t know what to say, other than to try to talk me out of my new plans, but when I’m like that, there’s no talking to me.  I droned on for hours and then woke up in the morning with a horrible headache, so the husband stayed home from work to take care of the kids while I rested.

Once I got the sleep out of my eyes, I texted my doula to tell her I wanted a c-section.  I wrote some facebook friends and told them the same.  I’m not quite sure how I thought a cesarean (or the following recovery) would make my life easier, but it seemed like something I could take control over, and the one thing I needed was some control.

Then, I messaged a friend who had a homebirth (after two prior cesareans) two years ago and I said:

“If I told you that I changed my mind and wanted to schedule a cesarean, what would you say?”

and she said

“I’d tell you that I said the same exact thing before my homebirth.  But I’m so glad I didn’t do that.”

That was nice to hear, but it didn’t help me get out of my funk.  I decided that I was too stressed and scared of the birth, and I’m smart enough to know that fear is a leading cause of birth complications.  I’ve read enough Ina May to know that deep-seated fears can sometimes totally derail a labor, and I decided that I couldn’t take the chance that my head problems could cause problems during my birth.  I was, quite seriously, minutes away from calling my midwife and asking her to risk me out.

And then, I took a nap.  I slept hard, and when I woke up, I went from being deliriously panicked to perfectly numb.  I took that as a sign that there was still time to salvage my attitude if I could just forget about all my obligations and focus on the upcoming Blessingway, which I thought of as my last-ditch-effort to fish me out of my hole.  I spent two days carefully shopping for Blessingway supplies and cleaning my house, and then Saturday morning, I woke up and posted this on facebook:

And amazingly, the party turned out to be everything I could have hoped for, and then some.  I could never, EVER have predicted how helpful and transformative that little soiree ended up being to me.  I actually had no idea what to expect from it because I’ve never been to one, and neither had most of my guests, but I sensed that it would be something magical.

I’m not a super touchy-feely person, and as we’ve discussed before, I swear I’m not a hippie.  Blessingways (or Mother Blessings) usually involve some sort of spiritual, goddessy vibe, and I’m the first to admit that’s not really my bag… at least I didn’t think so, anyway.  But in keeping with spirit of the ceremony, I asked my guests to bring a special bead to help me make a necklace for the labor, and also to bring one poem or prayer that we’d put into a scrapbook for me to look over between now and the birth.

Here’s where I assumed the whole thing would turn into some ridiculous, NOT-ME, forced attempt at spirituality.  But to my surprise, the party ended up being one of the most fun, hilarious, and yet emotionally moving events of my entire life.  I laughed so hard that my cheeks and belly hurt.  And on a couple of occasions, I was moved to tears.  We ate, and drank, and cussed, and told dirty jokes.  If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was more like a bachelorette party with some birth talk thrown in.

After everyone got settled in, all 15 of my guests piled around my living room to begin the ceremony.  We started by having everyone go around the room and tell how they knew me, which was so much fun to listen to.  I’m so proud of the way I’ve been able to build my own little tribe from a combination of moms I bonded with at a playgroup, to friends I met through the blog world, to old friends who just happen to serendipitously turn into birth junkies like me.

Then, we went around in a circle and talked about the beads that everyone brought.  This is the part where we all laughed at the fact that bead stores even exist because, until recently, none of us could figure out what the purpose of a bead store was  – that is, until someone invites you to a Blessingway and asks you to bring a bead! Ah, now it all makes sense.

Many of the beads came with deep spiritual meaning attached.  Some were made from healing stones, and some were shaped into symbols that represent peace, strength, or alignment.  One of my guests joked that her bead looked like it came out of a dime-bag, so we all made pot jokes.  Then, she said one looked like an 8-ball, and we joked that she was covering all of the “illegal drug” bases.  Then, another guest mentioned that she bought her bead at a bead store that just happened to be next to a porn shop, and from then on, Anal Beads became a running joke for the rest of the night.  As a matter of fact, when we took this picture, I shouted “Everyone say Anal Beads!!!” and so they did:

And you can tell from the shot just how much fun we were having.  After the beads, we sat down to read the poems and affirmations, and my guests touched my soul with the way they were able to choose readings that spoke to the very heart of my fears and anxiety.  Every poem they read felt designed specifically to address all the feelings I had been having in the days prior, and each word began lighting a path toward peace and acceptance of the impending birth day.  This one was one of the simplest, but one of my very favorites:

After that, some people started filing out, but about half the party stayed to watch my doula Henna my belly.  Now that I think about it, Henna application is actually a form of effleurage – which is a light massage commonly used during birth to calm fear and tension – so I guess it makes perfect sense that I felt like all my tension had melted away when she was done.

So here I am now.  I feel great.  For the first time, I actually don’t dreadfully fear labor beginning.  Not at this moment, anyway.  Knowing that I have all of these caring women around me, thinking of me, supporting me, makes me feel connected to something bigger than myself.  I feel the strength of all the women in all the years who came before me, and I know that these women faced all these same demons before and lived to tell about it.  I’ll be okay.  I know that now.

And in case I forget, I have this Blessingway Poem Book filled with wise, wise words from women who care about me to help remind me of my inner peace and strength.