Self-sufficiency is an illusion

My son was born in our bathroom.

It was late morning, and our midwife, Julie, was sitting outside, praying in tongues. The baby was meant to arrive in the birthing pool, but I didn’t fill it in time. I had one job that day – and I didn’t do it.

I didn’t exactly forget; I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the room. The space between contractions wasn’t long enough to make it down the stairs and back. They kept coming – like waves gathering more fury, more pain, more anticipation.

Bon Iver was on the playlist. The song ‘It might be over soon’ came on at just the right moment. We looked at each other and cried, delirious with joy. It was the truth. A word of grace. A welcome encouragement: This is going to pass. And it’s going to be worth it.

When he was born, and I watched my wife, Kara, clutch his tiny body, I felt a tangible connection to the most primal, ancient human experience. This is what we’ve been doing since the dawn of time. For all our ridiculous technological developments, this is how it all begins. You might have a robot vacuum or a car that drives itself – but it all comes back to the agony and awe of childbirth. 

Whether you’re squatting in a field, lying in a hospital bed or huddled together in a bathroom – there’s no escaping it. We come into the world in the most vulnerable of states, and nothing really changes. Beneath overalls and aprons, pinstripes and scrubs, we’re still naked little babies, with a hue of blue beneath the blood and slime we’re bathed in.

The illusion of self-sufficiency only distances us from the beauty of care and the grace of being held. I once believed the lie that you somehow outgrow that. I watched competent, qualified people and assumed they didn’t face the same gnawing sense of helplessness that I so often do. But all you need to do is start something for the first time, and that same rushing feeling of inadequacy floods in.

A relationship. A new hobby. A first day on the job. The first recovery meeting. All beginnings are marked with naked vulnerability.

And sometimes, we don’t even realise we’re being born into something new until we’re already in it – shivering and blinking in the light, an involuntary cry escaping from our lungs as we gasp for air.

We’re trained to outgrow need. To build distance from dependency. But the older I get, the more I’m convinced that true maturity looks more like a return back to that holy helplessness. Back to trust.

I was in a twelve-step meeting last week, and my friend said her new acronym for TRUST is: TRy Using Step Three, which reads: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.”

As odd as it sounds, doesn’t something in you exhale, even slightly, when you think about turning your life over to the care of someone with shoulders broad enough to carry it? Hands calloused enough to manage it? A heart large enough to contain the overwhelm, the exhaustion, and the self-loathing you feel?

It might be over soon.

None of this lasts very long – the bad bits or the best bits too. It’s all temporary and fleeting. Like Carl Sagan said: “We are butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”

You might as well try trusting the hands of God and see what happens.