To tell the tale of Syntia’s birth and my experience within and throughout it, let me go back to the night before. The picture of me in my green pyjamas was taken that night, after my first ‘bioscrub’ shower. I was given special antiseptic showergel to wash myself with that night and the next morning, already in preparation of the surgery. So, you see, the story starts here. That night was quite challenging to remain stable. We had prepared our hospital bag a long time ago, and any other odds and ends we needed to consider and have ready before the surgery and the arrival of our little one, had already been taken care of. In other words, I had nothing to do, to distract myself with. It was just me, the knowing that I was giving birth the next morning, and my mind that happily took every opportunity to present me with questions I had no answer to: What will it be like to meet my daughter, like the very moment I see her for the first time – what will go through me, what will I experience? Or will I experience nothing? Would that be bad? And what about the anaesthesia, a needle in my spine, what’s that going to feel like? If it hurts, what kind of pain would that be? How about laying on a table with no sensation in my body from the waist down, will I feel vulnerable as I see people bent over me, knowing they are cutting in my body, having their hands inside me, while possibly happily chatting about the weather or last night’s rugby game? Will I manage to breathe and remain stable? Or will I be so drugged up I will barely be aware of what’s happening around me? What if I become so emotional the moment my baby is born, that I might even be afraid to hold her for fear of harming her somehow – would me refusing to hold her scar her forever? The real torture was not that these questions were coming up and that each time, I knew, I had no answer to them – it was the fact that they were coming up for the so-many-th time. In the weeks leading up to the birth, each of those questions had already come up multiple times, and for each of those questions, I had already walked a multitude of scenarios in my imagination as all the possible answers I could conjure up. (*Spoiler Alert* How it eventually all went down, my mind couldn’t have come up with… - but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) When these questions would come up, I found it very hard to simply stop the thoughts and ‘just not think about that stuff’. I slipped into imagination almost immediately – and my attempts to stop myself from going there quickly started feeling like a fight and a struggle. So – instead of trying to stop the imagination, I decided to instead use the imagination to learn about myself. See – every scenario that I came up with showed me a part of myself. To use an example, in response to the question ‘How will I experience myself the moment my daughter is born?’ I once imagined myself laying there looking at my daughter with the thought coming up: ‘I wish Bernard were here to meet her’ while feeling deeply saddened. That showed me this sadness already existed within me, so I could look at it, forgive it and instead turn the sadness around completely into a gratefulness for Bernard – because without him, who knows, Syntia might have never been born. He was such a big part of my and Lj’s process that in a way, he made her possible together with us, and within that – he is a part of her too. Each of the scenarios I conjured up, showed me such points within me – fears, beliefs, desires, etc. that I hadn’t seen or worked with before. So, I used each of them as an opportunity to make space within me to be able to embrace the actuality, the real moments to come as they were going to play out – Fully. So, back to the night before – by now I knew my own mind in relation to these questions so well, that they were kind of just like ‘annoying flies’ – they had no more purpose flying around in my head anymore, so I moved into the application of simply stopping them, focusing on being here and chilling out while re-watching some episodes of ‘Supernatural’ with Lj. Indeed, I went to bed and fell asleep that night with these lyrics on repeat in my head: Carry on my wayward so-o-on - For there'll be peace when you are do-one - Lay your weary head to re-e-est - Don't you cry no-o more… To be continued!