Labor

“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children.” – Genesis 3:16

The only thing about having something growing inside you is that you know at some point it will have to come out. I used to think about the potential space that is the cervical canal and vagina, the nine-pound babies I’d hold in the NICU, and wonder how one exactly gets from point A to B. When I was a med student on the labor and delivery floor, I’d ask women in labor what it felt like, with little success. One woman in between contractions managed to tell me it felt like a train was running her over, which has scared me ever since.

It’s interesting that labor is one of the few divine mandates of suffering. I think about that phrase “greatly multiply”—what would labor have been like before the fall? Not comfortable, but maybe more manageable. Imagine that.

Somehow labor is tied up in the fall, a fundamental part of the female experience that, while being about good, reflects our separation from God. I think about how we are meant to experience it. How life can only come about through great pain.

I occasionally think about whether I’d have the resolve to try giving birth without an epidural. There are the physical benefits, and I think part of me wants to push against the modern medical tendency to medicate away suffering. At the same time, I’ve spoken with enough women to know that labor is painful no matter whether you get an epidural or not, and there seems to be a point reached where the pain becomes almost impossible to rationally tolerate.

Regardless, by proof of the fact that women have multiple children, the price is worth the pain. In that way labor is in a sense a condensed, physical enactment of the spiritual life, a foreshadowing of what Christ came to do, a reflection of the chronic struggles we walk through day-by-day. Great joy as a result of great pain, perhaps pain we would not have chosen had we known what it was. Pregnancy is a nine-month anticipation of and inner preparation for that process. Here we go.

Week Twenty-Seven