Parenthood: Week 348 – The Experience I Cannot Know

This past Saturday, for the third time in my life, Diana my wife went into labor, which led to the birth of our third son Lucas early Sunday morning.

Witnessing and helping Diana through these experiences of child labor hasn’t changed what I think about women, but it has confirmed ideas that I have, and has led to an evolution in the way that I view our world and the human experience.

I have always believed that women are strong, and in some way stronger than men. However, there is something more to this belief that came to me as I witnessed Diana move through one of the difficult parts of the human experience.

The process of childbirth is one of the most difficult physical, and emotional experiences that a human can go through. And no, painkillers and the option of caesarean section do not create a pain free way of moving through this process. Childbirth is scary and life threatening. Things can go south very quickly for the mother and the child even in the best of situation.

It’s an experience that is central and fundamental to all of our existences, yet most people’s ideas about the business of being born are flawed, full of misunderstandings, and influenced by patriarchal ideas about gender. If every adult intimately understood and experienced in a meaningful way the challenges and plurality of experiences that people go through in child birth, we would have a very different society.

Cis-gendered men like myself can never experience childbirth. It’s something that I can read about and learn about but I can never truly “get.” There’s a limit to my understanding of what it means to be human because I will never be able to experience what it means to bear a child first-hand. Cis-gendered men, can never birth children, and the strength and insights that women gain from this process, I will never be able to attain. There are other experiences that I can have that I can grow from, that can make strong, but not in the same a women can gain strength through childbirth.

Someone can be a great teacher without being a parent. However, not including a person who is a parent in a teaching community is mistake. Not including someone who has experienced childbirth on a board where important decision are being made is absurd. How could you possibly make an important decision in life without consulting the perspective that can only come from someone who has created life?

There is nothing I can compare the strength, courage, and perseverance Diana displayed last weekend, and the last 9 months. Watching her, only a day later taking charge in the hospital getting ready to go home, I was in awe. It takes me a day to recover running a 5K. Diana had been through something far more difficult a day earlier and was already making things happen.

Part of me wishes that I could experience what Diana did with childbirth, but mostly I'm happy that this is something that she has done, that I can sit back and admire.  I love that she has been to a place that I can't go.  I love that she has strength to draw from these experiences, and more than ever in my life, I love her.