“There’s really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And... it’s lonely” —Amanda Palmer

Lately I’ve been thinking about how we learn to take care of ourselves. The word “resilience” is being reexamined for its message. Is it a compliment to be told how strong you are or is it something else?

My own experience with endurance could probably be distilled to how I gave birth. My son stood up in the final days after being head down for nine months. The decision was made to turn the baby in the womb so, hopefully, a caesarian could be avoided. I was in a holistic, water-birth based practice in London headed by two celebrity obstetricians. Famous people had given birth in this hospital and, coincidentally, my grandmother had done her nurse’s training there in the months before WWI when she went to France and nursed in the trenches. The turning is called an external cephalic version (ECV). This happened in a tiny room with a person monitoring via Ultrasound, my doctor and me and my baby. The father of this baby was also there but barely in the room. Basically, the doctor stood on the bed and forced my son to flip. It was one of the least pleasurable experiences I have ever had made worse by my sense that he was being forced against his will to change positions which seemed like a bad preview of the future.

Because of the ECV it took seventy-two hours of hard back labor for Luke to be born. My ex went to work, meals were consumed, walks were taken and if I never hear a single note of Enya’s Orinoco Flow, I will be happy. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced in my life and yet it never occurred to me to give up. When we had the post birth interview with the doctor my husband revealed his fear that both myself and the baby were going to die. Then why didn’t you stop us, I thought, “She was so strong,” my ex added, the doctor nodding. I felt desolated.

During those night hours of labor, I was stark naked and stark raving mad. I wandered the halls of the hospital unable to bear the hammering pain without movement and at some moment I felt the ghost of my grandmother near me, a vague shimmering presence inspired, no doubt, by sleep deprivation and extreme pain. She did not help me. She just nodded approval. My mother had told us that my grandmother’s experiences in the trenches of WWI had made her largely indifferent to her own children’s bumps and bruises. I could not let myself surrender, I could not allow the idea of modifying this holistic water birth to become a surgical experience with pain relief and doctors. I was doomed to be a warrior despite all the advances of modern medicine.

And then there was this secret fear. I will ask and you will say “no.”

My son was and is the best thing that has ever happened to me. He was a shining star of a baby and I have never really looked hard at the suffering involved to bring him into this world. But I have often felt as if it has been my job to work harder than other people to justify the space I occupy in the world.

When people say nice things about me the word ‘strong’ is frequent. Also, the metaphor of a phoenix rising out of the ashes. What ashes? Alcoholism, a family tragedy, domestic violence, you name it. But here’s the thing. It took so much work, so many Twelve Step meetings, so many hours of therapy, so many refusals to retreat and die, so many sad, lonely days to reconstruct this human being. This human being who would someday give birth to a baby she loved so much that all those days of labor seemed to fade except, as always, there was that lingering question, “Why didn’t anyone help me?”

I was trained to believe asking for help was weak, that anything like my failure to comprehend math, or tie a wrap-around skirt so it didn’t fall off, or keep track of one’s parent in a public place when three years old was my fault. I was told getting raped, being sexually harassed, being physically menaced was my fault for being pretty, for being smart and for wanting to work in a job that had few women. So, no, don’t label someone you admire with words like resilient or strong or, god forbid, a survivor. There are other ways to support and inspire a person who has managed to stay alive than making it seem like they possess a quality that reduces those tribulations to minor setbacks.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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