Labor Day

The calm is not enough to lull you. It's the microseconds after a hard sprint, before the rush of endorphins washes strain from your muscles, where every sensation tells you that your body is still struggling, still suffering, though you no longer make progress. It is planting your second foot firmly in the snow at 14,000 feet, gasping for breath in the oxygen-thin air, succumbing to your body's demand for respite, but knowing that you've lost your acclimation to the pain when the next step begins. And in that lucid moment you have in pause, you are cognizant enough to look up in search of the aspired for mountain apex, but it's whereabouts are obscured, by cloud or by false summits.

There is an end. You know that in fact, but you cannot know it in feeling. In the animal part of your brain, facts are a weak opponent to what you feel.

Yet you take your next step, always climbing, each step more trying than the last. Each step a commitment to ignore the protests of your muscles, your bones and joints, to pursue your crazed obsession. But here, there is no choice. While mountain fever might possess one to never give up until the top is reached, the option always remains. Turn back. Turn around and instantly feel thicker air with each step. Let gravity ease your burden.

But this is different. The next contraction is an event already decided on 9 months previous. There is no turning back any more.

You may be engulfed into your own personal world of pain laying down, or perhaps sitting. But I stand, arms wrapped around the neck of co-manufacturer of my condition, in the midst of calm. Well before the next wave comes, I can already feel the involuntary tightening ball in my midsection. Oh no. I utter, and the signal is given that soon I will be far from this place, and anything my body does while I am gone is of no concern to me any more.

The sensation grows, sucking me into a black-hole of pain, throwing out only the gamma radiation of primal cries, manufactured by my body in the absence of commands from a now vacated mind. The body has no better instruction and knows no better response.

Information, once entering this black-hole, can never escape. Even the memory of the pain cannot be retained. The knowledge that it was experienced survives from outside the event horizon, but the experience itself will never surface again. At least, until the next contraction.

Slowly, it releases me back to my body, and I am in the moment, understanding only that I am back in the calm I look down. A fat drop of blood, laid thickly in deep red, forms a perfect circle on the laminate hospital floor. I stare at it until the next wave overtakes me.

When I surface, another drop. And I plunge into the world of pain again.

Three drops. Then gone. Four. Five.

Now there are too many drops to count. They have overwhelmed the floor and begun to coalesce and form a crimson pond.

Hours ago, I could remind myself, soon, this experience would all be just a memory. Now, there is no opportunity for such self-reassurances. The mind is unable to collect itself in time to do anything more than recognize its own existence between bouts of oblivion.

Time does not exist as it does normally. Ninety seconds are an eternity, yet the hours that pass collectively are no longer constructed by the minutes and seconds of the clock. They are a series of waves and calms, lined up together, one by one, like beads on a string. There is no end in sight, but neither was there a beginning. This world simply always was, is and will be. The end of labor, like before its start, does not dictate it existence. It has merely defined my visit.

The end of labor and the start of active pushing brings me back the real world. Pain now has purpose. It is active and prophetic. The calms, the few that exist, now host the possibility of hope, desire, fear and anxiety. It is a place where strength of mind and heart can make a difference. Where it is possible to have courage.

Oh no, I utter as each pushing contraction begins to build, but their quality has changed. Before I was dragged away, helpless and passive, to an isolated plane of existence. Now, this pain, andmy words steel me and provide strength. Screams are not the absence of the mind They are products of will.

Here it comes. I gather my strength!

Push! Mind and body act as one with determination.

Do not give up! Now is the time to show strength.

“Okay, look down!” the doctor tells me and I do. Surprising to me, somewhere in the middle of the battle a child was born.

Welcome to the outside world, Eiger.