I cannot describe the euphoria of meeting our daughter for the first time. I felt everything.
130am. 157am. 415am. 550am. 715am. 750am. 10am. 1205nn. 1pm. 255pm. 525pm. 650pm. 800pm. 912pm. 1145pm. 1212am. 255am. 440am. 620am.
It’s not a cinema schedule for a red-eye screening. (And frankly there’s no movie with such a changeable runtime.) It’s a real log of my breastfeeding schedule, dated May 8 to 9, 2024, for my 15-day-old baby Imogen.
Like most millennials, one of my earliest concepts of birth was ingrained in high school, when the teacher played a 1982 documentary film entitled, The Miracle of Life. It was less than 60 minutes but I will never forget the final scene which showed in quite graphic detail a woman, in obvious pain and with legs wide and stirruped onto a hospital bed, giving birth to a baby.
On every birthday that passed, every new church or occasion where a wish may be made, every wistful glance at the night sky, I fervently prayed to be given this gift.
Since then, I would come across further portrayals of birth in mainstream media that I would later come to understand as “institutional” birth. They were all pretty much the same–from the water bag breaking to the recurring common denominator of screaming women on hospital beds, sometimes played as comic relief and other times as edge of your seat, tense-filled dramas.
Life and birth
I found out that I was pregnant in August 2023. My period, which is normally like clockwork, was late all of a sudden and even my husband noticed. I admit it was not the first time that I had taken a pregnancy test. My husband Ramon and I were married in September 2017, and to say that we have had an inordinate share of comments, both kind and rude, from familiars and strangers alike, asking us when we were going to have kids is quite the understatement.
I couldn’t explain it but this time though, it felt different. I felt different. And it was one of the happiest moments of our lives. I took three tests for good measure and to see all of them turn into the much-awaited double line was happiness beyond belief.
Getting there was a years-long process and I would be lying if I didn’t admit to needing time and making several hard choices to get into the right shape and frame of mind to become pregnant. I retired from my workaholic ways (well, most, if not all of them). I learned to say no to things, to people, to situations that weren’t the right energy for me. I had to unlearn a lot of self-limiting beliefs about my health and fitness to become somewhat as strong as my island-crossing swimmer husband.
I ran fun runs until I graduated into a full 42km marathon in 2019. In the pandemic, we fought the fear and the cabin fever by being productive inside our condo, launching our animated YouTube channel Miming and Friends, while practicing yoga daily until we finished 180 days or at least six successive 30 days of Yoga with Adriene series.
I learned how to cook and bake from scratch, adopting sourdough as my literal bread and butter until it became a fledgling business of its own. We became our own gurus so much that when my husband returned to our unit in 2021 to pack up all of our worldly belongings to move permanently to his native Dumaguete, he found a whole cabinet of expired and unused drugs–a testament to how far I had come in my physical wellbeing.
And yet I was still not pregnant.
Reports say that there is the spark of the divine, or a light, when the egg meets the sperm. And that unknowable, immeasurable variable, is what really tips the scales. My pregnancy was miraculous on so many levels.
This was not something I let on. Not even a breath of it escaped my lips, that I was trying, that I was frustrated. I didn’t tell the family. I didn’t tell my dearest friends. My nearest know that I am not the crying and wailing type but this matter was the one thing that could make my proverbial dams break. And I only survived because my darling husband never once pressured me. And on those few times I would cry (as if) in failure, he would say it doesn’t matter, that the two of us were enough.
And yet on every birthday that passed, every new church or occasion where a wish may be made, every wistful glance at the night sky, I fervently prayed to be given this gift.
In early 2023, I decided to seek professional help but only ended up leaving the clinic in tears upon meeting the reliever of a celebrity doctor who made me feel like yet another number in her very long queue. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I studied. I scoured the great wide web to figure out the best protocol for me. I gave up my favorite carb, the staple food of my people and my country, white rice, and adopted a simpler diet of indigenous adlai and malunggay. I ingested nearly a whole alphabet of vitamins and minerals in supplements, and for once in my night-loving, city girl, bookworm life, I learned to embrace the provincial clock and sleep early, deep, and long.
And then she finally came.
Spark of the divine
Despite everything though, I still feel like it wasn’t just what we did that helped us get pregnant. To get into a whole metaphysical and spiritual discussion would finish my word count, but above it all, I firmly believe that our daughter chose her timing, and in her and God’s wisdom, chose us to be her parents.
Reports say that there is the spark of the divine, or a light, when the egg meets the sperm. And that unknowable, immeasurable variable, is what really tips the scales. My pregnancy was miraculous on so many levels. At that time I had found another clinic that spoke to me in much better terms and when I went to them to report our spontaneous pregnancy, my doctor had to pick up her jaw from the ground, but she was ecstatic. It sent the nurses into a bit of a tizzy, and I heard them chattering “spontaneous pregnancy, spontaneous pregnancy” as they were getting me ready for a sonogram that confirmed the tiny speck that would become the baby I now hold.
I well and truly believe in miracles for these number of reasons and more. My baby never gave me morning sickness. I was 39 years old going on 40 but I also did not get gestational diabetes, nor high blood pressure or preeclampsia, or any of the other diseases that allegedly plague someone of my “geriatric pregnancy.”
In my first trimester, I even managed to travel all around Pangasinan, from Binalonan to Bolinao, for a week-long work shoot that started sunrise and ended well into the evening, and in my second trimester, I was able to cook meals for the whole international clan who descended unto Dumaguete for my brother-in-law Miguel’s wedding party and even managed to bake the wedding cake together with my team and my husband. We traveled to Hongkong to welcome my 40th and to be with my family and through it all I walked, ate and shopped to my heart’s delight, while carrying and growing this not so little bundle of joy.
And never a day passed that I did not thank God, my ancestors, my mother in heaven, and all the kind well-wishers in my life, for these things.
I had become a living miracle, growing a life inside of me.
Mate and matter
And throughout it all, my one constant is my husband.
There is not enough time in this world for me to talk about the importance of having a good mate. Not just a spouse, but a primal mate who supports you in all ways. Not because you are not enough, but precisely because you are, and in your wholeness, you require someone who can match you in strength, belief, and aspiration.
When we found out about my pregnancy, my husband transformed into an even better caregiver than he already was when we were just two. He was patient with me and helped me throughout my pregnancy, affirming me, and reminding me of how capable and strong I was. [And spoiler alert, that same man who is a rock throughout pregnancy and labor, is now the same one who is a hands-on father, changing every single diaper, burping our baby, and holding me first as a mother who is healing, breastfeeding and learning the ropes of this new role.]
There is not enough time in this world for me to talk about the importance of having a good mate. When we found out about my pregnancy, my husband transformed into an even better caregiver than he already was when we were just two.
After months of traveling through rabbit holes of information, I elected for an unmedicated water birth, having been inspired by one of my best friends, Jean, and an acquaintance Noelle (who doesn’t even know that her experience struck me) and many nameless women I’ve stalked on Instagram and Youtube who also chose to do a water birth.
To me it was the ideal birth, so unlike that first one I watched when I was still in high school. Here, in a water birth, the mother looks in control, at peace and the baby emerges like the celestial that they really are.
My husband was fully on board and supported this decision, even joining my YouTube binges as I learned as much as I can, from breathing exercises to prenatal practices and finally to the actual positions I would need to adopt to bring our baby safely into this world.
I tracked down the best doula in the country, Birthing Gently’s Irina Otmakhova and her midwife partner Aileen Gay Vinoya, and made sure they were my birth team.
On April 23, 1am, I woke up to a start. I felt contractions of a different level, they were no longer junior league, no longer for a testing run or warm-up. I told my husband, “This is it. Call the birth team.”
I was already 41 weeks and 1 day pregnant, and as the team of Irina, Aileen and Alaina was making their way, suddenly the atmosphere in the house turned electric. My brother in law, Gabby, who was visiting at the time, also woke up, and together with my husband, they prepped the room for my labor. My parents- and aunt-in-law sat outside the bedroom, to meet the birth team, in excitement and nervousness.
I only managed to cue up my playlist of affirmations when the surges started becoming seismic. Despite all of my training, nothing could truly prepare me for the sensations of labor and birth. Of course, it was my first time, but as the surges intensified and I transitioned from peaceful vocalizations to intense tongues such that I’ve never heard come out of me before, I truly felt the immense blessing of having my husband, my mate, hold me through it all.
Although the marathon was a picnic compared to what I was feeling, it provided the perfect metaphor through the hours of labor. My husband would tell me, “Remember kilometer 35, this is when you met the wall. You’re just in kilometer 35. You can break through it.”
As a mother, I hope to be present, to be mindful, and yes, to be happy so our daughter can be happy.
Then it became “kilometer 40, then 41” Or in labor speak, dilating to 9cm then finally active labor at 10cm.
Time and space stood still across those hours and minutes. To add to the drama of the whole morning, my sister in law Carmen was also migrating to the Netherlands that same day. And as I sat in my inflatable pool, we blew air kisses at each other and wept tears of goodbye as she readied to leave for the airport.
In the final three hours of active labor, I had to put myself in a trance. I began picturing the faces of all of the mothers I knew. Starting with my own and counting down into the family and friends who have walked this path ahead of me.
I muttered the affirmations that I had learned across the months, clutching my husband tightly as he was my life raft through the surges that were cracking me open. My birth team was my coach and cheerleader through all of these, getting me into the right movements to align me for the final pushes, validating me and making sure I knew I was still strong, until we were ready to unravel into birth.
Daily grace
And now I am a mother. And a mother’s work is never done.
I cannot describe the euphoria of meeting our daughter. I felt everything. And in feeling everything, I was rewarded with the rush of pure oxytocin and endorphins that came with crossing that finish line. Those last ten seconds were a blur and yet I remember the very physical swoosh of my baby emerging, swimming out, and me catching her and lifting her into my arms and kissing her perfect head and lifting her perfect body as we all gushed tears of joy.
In these 15, 16, 17 days of motherhood, through stitches and sleeplessness, I still wax poetic about the whole experience. I know birth does not necessarily make a mother and there are plenty of mothers out there who have never experienced birth but who definitely qualify as mothers. They rear their children and raise them to be good human beings.
And yet for all of us mothers, I think it is safe to say that we know what it’s like to transmute pain into power, to turn discomfort into grace. Not just because of birth, but because in the day to day, we surrender to our child’s best interests, we make choices and sacrifice gladly for the greater good of our family.
One of the best things I’ve learned recently is that gratitude and fear cannot co-exist.
I remember during labor, when it was overwhelmingly challenging, I kept thanking our baby for choosing us to be her parents. I repeatedly thanked all the angels above that she was arriving earthside. My youngest sister in law, Anna, sang to our daughter who was only five days old at the time, and she caught a smile that we fell in awe of because babies are supposed to smile at six weeks old, not a few days in.
Our daughter has been writing her own milestones and smiling ever since. And through the new terrain of breastfeeding and being on the treadmill of what are now two- to three-hour cycles across day and night, I simply choose to marvel at the beautiful being we are now custodians of, and can overcome exhaustion and breathe easy in that thought.
As parents, there will be times when we’re racked with worry or fear and I hope to practice this lesson of gratitude. Right now, I’m in gelai or Chinese confinement, what I can define as 30 days of nourishment, rest and grace. I know parenthood will forever change us, and might already have, but I am calmed and guided by these wonderful words from Vietnamese Buddhist monk and poet Thich Nhat Hanh, “The best gift we can give our children is our happiness.”
As a mother, I hope to be present, to be mindful, and yes, to be happy so our daughter can be happy.
Happy Mothers’ day to all the mothers, the fathers who are also mothers, the family members and friends who are also temporary mothers, and to all of the people who know what it truly is to be a mother—to hold someone so dear in your heart that you live for them.
