My second son came into the world two months ago after a long, hard labor, dropping into my midwife’s hands as I knelt on my bed at home. This birth was a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) and I have, in essence, been planning it for seven years, shortly after my first son came into the world after 54 hours with the help of a surgeon’s scalpel, much to my surprise and my devastation.

Gaining 30 pounds in such a short period of time is no small thing. It creates an entirely different set of loads on all the tissues of the body, whether it's the feet, the pelvic floor, the lateral hips, or the arms. But this work - this showing up to myself in so many ways and this changing of how I think about and relate to the movement of my body through my environment - has had a profound impact on the way my body can handle such massive changes. 

All the healing work I've done, all the movement and dietary changes and emotional preparation, all the stuff I thought would help didn't give me a different physical experience. In the midst of this, two things happened.