I Wanted to Experience Everything

On the birth that asked me to trust what I couldn't control

My jaw chattered uncontrollably. I thought it would never stop.

My shoulders contracted like a fist closing around the top of my spine, held there by a reflex to protect with no way to release it.

.

This was not the birth I had planned.

.

I had wanted to experience everything.

A natural, unmedicated birth.

So there would be nothing between me and what my body knew how to do.

I wanted to be awake inside it.
To meet whatever came and be changed because of it.

As an embodiment guide…

I had spent so much time learning to trust the body’s intelligence. To move toward sensation rather than away from it. I knew, in a cellular way, that our bodies hold a capacity most of us never get to discover.

I wanted to find mine.

When the labor began… Finally, after days of trying to nudge it along… I welcomed it. All of it.

—

My sister working macramé into a small toy for the baby. She was not able to stay for the entire birth as she had flown in too early but managed to make this small token of love — a gentle reminder that my baby would soon be born and that play was imminent.

My husband was there, anxious and overtired, trying to steady himself from the lack of sleep and the unseen demands of this experience. My doula held a calm, unwavering presence, a lightness that helped to shutter any lingering fear of the unknown.

When the contractions finally came. Everything fell away.

I began to move. Guided by a force that ached but was also purposeful.

As the pain began to surge, I knew to invite the sounds. Those low, guttural tones, timed to the peaks of pain to steady the labor and move it along. had read so much about these moments from Ina May Gaskin. Her Guide to Childbirth had found me at exactly the right moment. Midwives had always known about these sounds. My doula was no different. The moment the contractions began, she helped connect me to the ferocity that would keep me going for the next three days.

She didn’t explain it. She just knew. And that kind of knowing, in moments like these, is its own form of medicine.

And still. Nothing had prepared me for what it actually was.

The sound didn’t calm me. It ignited a force I had no word for.

—

Primal, total, already mine.

Each low tone moved through the contraction rather than against it, giving my nervous system something to follow. The pain didn’t disappear. But it became a wave that I could lean into, a vibration to ride. They also help the cervix to naturally soften.

I thought: so this is what the body already knows how to do.

There is something a hospital environment does quietly, without meaning to. It raises the social stakes of sound. Women learn to manage themselves. To keep it contained. To perform a version of labor that doesn’t disturb the room.

I was grateful my doula was there, and my husband was present holding space, and that my own years of somatic practice had given me permission I didn’t know I’d need. Permission to be loud. To be primal. To let the sound do what sound has always known how to do.

But labor stalled. Then started again. Then stalled.

My baby’s heart, monitored continuously, would periodically signal distress. Positions were adjusted. Medications were titrated up, then paused. Hours passed in the strange suspended time of a labor ward — intense, then waiting, then intense again.

At some point, the epidural. The relief of it was its own kind of surrender.

And then, finally, pushing. And then, the baby beginning to show signs of distress again. And a doctor walking in, having reviewed my chart, recommending a C-section.

I asked for one more chance.

The baby’s heart told us what it needed.

And I understood.

It was my doula who said it, as they were preparing to wheel me in.

She leaned close.

“Remember,” she said. “You wanted to experience everything. And this is everything.”

I don’t have a word for what moved through me in that moment. It wasn’t comfort exactly. It was more like being returned to myself—to the intention I had set, held up so I could see it still intact, still true, even here. Especially here.

She didn’t console me. She witnessed me. And in doing so, she gave me back my agency at the exact moment I thought I’d lost it.

Breath came in at the top of my chest, sharp and thin, and went out just as quickly.

There was a voice.
Mine or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell.
“Keep breathing.”

I was still shaking, but there were seams of stillness between the tremors, and in those seams I could hear her. Soft at first, like a distant gull, then clearer. And then—her cry.

I was still shaking. I kept asking my husband where she was. She was somewhere behind me, beyond what I could reach or see.

My body didn’t know it was over.
It kept running the emergency long after the emergency had passed.

This is the language of the nervous system under extreme threat. The unknown.

And then I heard him.
My husband’s voice, close to my ear.

“She’s perfect,” he said.

And I knew. She was here. She was safe. Everything I had moved through had delivered us both.

I understood something I couldn’t have arrived at any other way.

The body I had brought into that room—the body that knew how to make those sounds, that could lean into a wave instead of fighting it, that had found reserves of endurance I hadn’t known were there—had done everything it came to do.

The outcome changed.

My capacity didn’t.

I had gone somewhere I didn’t know I could go.
That isn’t nothing.
It is, in fact, everything.

My daughter was taken to the NICU while I was sewn back together. I couldn’t hold her…yet.

On the first and second days I could only view her through the glass.

Finally, on the third day, they let me hold her.

And there I hummed and told her that we would soon leave this place.

Her eyes widened.

Her body softened.

As if she had been waiting for exactly this.

She knew me by sound before she ever knew me by sight.

Of course she did.

—

We are not taught that surrender is a form of strength. We are taught that it is the absence of it.

But I have felt what the body does when it finally lets go of what it cannot control. There is something that becomes available in that release. A different kind of power. Softer. More total.

I would not change a single thing.

Not the stalled labor.

Not the epidural.

Not the blue curtain, my chattering jaw, or the operating table.

Not the doctor who walked in at the final moment.

Not the doula who leaned close and told me the truth.

I wanted to experience everything.

And I did.

With warmth and rooted presence,

Megwyn 🌿

Signal & Skin — 01 · The Primal Bond

On the body remembering what it always knew, even in the hardest moments.

Signal and Skin is a somatic journal exploring what it means to live in a human body within a hyperconnected world.