Surrender

What I know now about parenting is to "surrender." I've learned how childbirth brings with it self discovery, self healing, and adaptation to the new selves we become every single day of our lives. No one ever told me that, as an adult, I would keep on changing. I would have to move and flow with changes in myself, as well as all around me, for the rest of my life. No one ever explained that this process never ends, that it is infinite. Learning to surrender means learning to go with change; and change requires surrender. From the first days of pregnancy when the baby inside you begins to puff out your belly and breasts, makes you nauseated and tired, makes you have emotional heights and depths, radically affects your relationship with everyone around you, you are asked by this tiny life to adapt to these changes. If you resist you will suffer. You must give in. You do let go. You shed your old self. Perhaps pregnancy, more than any other period in a woman's life, enables her to understand the complexity of this requirement in life-to change and to adapt. Pregnancy enables us to open a multitude of doorways-into ourselves, into our ancestral past, and into our future. Sometimes walking through these doors can shift old patterns on this planet. The gift of childbirth challenges us to take nothing for granted and to flow around any rocky obstacle.