an induction
on the births you don’t expect
I saw a post on Instagram several months ago, and it said that among the “bad” reasons to have an induction is because you are past your due date or because it’s Christmas. The post - or maybe these posts blur together - offer us the promise that there is a right way to do it. The “it” could be so many things: give birth, educate children, find work/life balance, read, advocate, pray.
Something about this post threw me back into the hospital rooms of my children’s births, and before that, to the waiting rooms, to the ultrasounds. I’m staring at the ceiling, popcorn-tiled flecked and the same from room to room. In my head I am playing through the images of natural births, water births, skin to skin, breastfeeding, I am soaked in sepia-toned stills. When the doctors come in - at 18 weeks, at 20 weeks, at 36 weeks, here we are again talking with words that do not feature in those images: NICU doctors, intubation, feeding support, pumping.
I have been inducted into motherhood with a world of hidden meanings: the meaning of holding hands with my husband without our wedding rings because you cannot wear jewelry from the elbow down. The meaning of the first time I held my son without the wire monitoring his blood oxygen. The meaning of putting him upright in the carseat, tiny orange vest and even tinier trach tube perched above it, and driving home.
When I am induced later, with my daughters, I am still being induced into motherhood and its hidden meanings. Here I am inducted into the world of epidurals, tiny blue ice pops, and the exhilarating exhaustion of a night with a drawer of tiny diapers in my room.
My daughters’ births were planned inductions. So was my son’s. My son because he needed the kind of medical care that does not come with a room and the delicious mini blue popsicles. My daughters because my son needed specialized care and arranging that so my partner could be present at our daughters’ births mattered.
And even those reasons start to fall away, not because they are not reasons, but because they matter less in the face of the bigger truth: these are the things that happened. These are the things that are.
Induction means giving rise to something, introducing, bringing about. An induction is a production of an electrical or magnetic state. I think about this word, so apt to describe what has happened and is always happening in my life: I am being inducted into it. Into motherhood, into potty training, into the sisterhood of late nights, into the comraderie of the working parents. I am inducted into friendships, which give rise to laughter, which gives rise to joy. I am inducted into the gift of the world as it is, for it is a gift, despite and in the midst of all of our falling short.
In philosophy we talk a lot about counterfactuals, the word that means the “could-have-been” or “might-be.” We imagine the world if we or someone else or something else were different. When we live in that space, the space of possibilities, it is easy to get lost. I swim from one to the other - what if I had chosen different schools for my children, or had eaten less sugar in my childhood? What if I had worked harder at this, or worried less about that?
But perhaps my favorite things about this way of thinking philosphically is that there is a fundamental anchor in it, always: the world as it is right now. There is no “what-if” unless there is something already there. Something has to be for us to even start imagining it being different. And when that imagining is done, and all the possibilities float away like smoke on the water - there we are.
None of us are ready for our lives. We are inducted into them.
My physical inductions were a giving rise to something. They gave rise to my children, they gave rise to my body in change, in movement, in pain, yes, but also in another moment of living. My inductions were my introduction, every time, to the truth that many times the things we thought we knew are not the things we come to know. What seemed so essential turns out not to be. What seemed so small becomes the most precious thing.
What a gift, for life to give rise to so much. And what a wonder, that we are permitted to receive it as it is.