Becoming a mother meant losing everything else first

Giving birth brought me back to life after years of grief.

Two years ago this May, I became a mother.

My son was born on a bright Spring afternoon in the middle of Manhattan after a long night of labor. He made his descent “sunny side up,” a cute term for an inverted position that caused his skull to push against the nerves in my lower back, turning “contractions” into one nonstop wave of excruciating pain. To get him out, the midwife had to spend hours reaching into the birth canal and slowly rotating his head until he was ready (a good time for everyone).

We did what we could to make the hospital room feel safe and soothing. Next to the bed was a makeshift altar on a tray table with a statue of Tara, the female Buddha, surrounded by LED candles (no real candles—a hospital requirement). Behind it, a stash of blue gatorade, my third trimester indulgence (don’t judge). I wore sunglasses the whole time to shield myself from the offensive brightness of the fluorescent hospital lights.

Throughout my labor, Tina Turner’s album of Buddhist chants was the one thing that calmed me through the worst of the pain. We played it on repeat. Later, when my husband turned his phone off airplane mode, we got the news alert: Tina Turner had died that day, May 24, as our son was being born. I like to imagine them passing each other, exchanging a high five and a few words of encouragement on their ways in and out of the world.

After nearly 20 hours of labor, my son Max arrived, immediately finding his way to my heart and resting peacefully there in the hazy afternoon light of the hospital room, shades drawn and LED candles gently flickering.

The “golden hour” after his birth was one of those rare, perfect moments in life, made all the more precious because of what it took to get there.

From the beginning, my journey to getting pregnant was shadowed by loss. Every time I moved toward life, I was met by death. This was the strange and unwelcome reality of my path to motherhood: three deaths on the way to one birth. It’s not the path I would have chosen, but it’s the one that chose me. And it’s shaped my understanding of what it means to be a mother.

Within days of first deciding to start trying for a baby, I got the call: my dad was in the ER. He died just a few months later of advanced colon cancer, right before my 30th birthday. Then, as spring returned seven months later and I began to look to the future again, another call: My brother had died of a heroin overdose. The shock of the loss felt too big to hold, and my entire system froze. It was the first weeks of COVID, and the days passed in a blur. Stuck inside my Brooklyn apartment, I could barely sleep for weeks and entered something of an altered state, never fully asleep and never fully awake. The only thing that put me at ease was walking under the magnolia trees, blooming in white and pink, in the empty parks in my neighborhood.

The double blow, amidst the isolation of the pandemic, derailed me. In the aftermath of my brother’s death, I could barely sleep, much less think about conceiving. My plans for getting pregnant were put indefinitely on hold.

It wasn’t until two years later, again with the first warm days of early Spring, that I felt ready to start a new chapter. But the morning after our first try, we awoke to “the call” again: a dear friend, one of my husband’s closest friends and colleagues, was killed in Ukraine. He was the first American journalist lost in the war. The shock and horror were overwhelming, and my husband went into a deep spiral of grief. The timing felt cruel.

But this time, I kept going. I had to. We kept trying for a baby throughout that Spring and Summer. After six months, doubt crept in. The amount of time that had passed wasn’t itself much of a concern, or my age, or any kind of health considerations. I just knew my own body, and I could tell that there was something going on. I started to wonder if all the pain and loss I’d experienced would make it impossible for me to get pregnant; if it had somehow made me inhospitable to life. Failing to get pregnant ripped some deep, dark fears. A voice in my head kept asking You’ve lost your family—what if you can’t create one of your own? Can you really handle another loss? And the worst: Maybe there’s something wrong with you.

Following my gut sense that something was blocking the process, I found myself at a Family Constellations workshop. The facilitator—also named Nick, like my brother—guided me in setting up the “constellation,” a symbolic representation of my family meant to illuminate any hidden dynamics that might be playing out in the current situation. In constellations, participants become actors who “represent” different family members, following their natural impulses and reactions to act out unconscious patterns impacting the family system.

The moment the constellation formed, it was clear: ever since my brother died, I’d been hovering in a no man’s land between life and death. He was gone, and I was still here—but I wasn’t fully alive. To choose life again felt like a betrayal of my brother; leaving him behind felt unbearable.

I didn’t want to let go of Nick, the one who drove me to my AP French classes on Wednesday nights on the back of his motorcycle, who taught me to love the Grateful Dead, who read Vonnegut and Sartre, whose outwardly badass appearance disguised a deeply gentle and wise soul. Moving on felt like closing the door on him—and on our relationship and bond as siblings. In other words, it felt like a betrayal. We’d always looked out for each other, and my final act of loyalty to him was staying close by, even if it meant not fully participating in my life. In my grief, at least we were still connected.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the person representing my brother, a kind-looking older Ukrainian woman. She had tears in her eyes and a hand on her heart when she looked at me and said: “your baby is waiting for you.” Later, she told me that those words were not her own—she had felt my brother speaking through her.

Nick the facilitator asked me if I was ready to turn away from my brother and turn to face the future. Slowly, I turned towards the representatives for my husband and my child, who stood at the other side of the room in front of a large sunny window. As I turned to the future, the sunlight streaming in the windows, my whole body got chills, and I felt alive with energy, possibility, apprehension, a faint glimmer of excitement, but mostly fear. There was no easy overcoming this fear. I just had to try to move forward along with it. So I did.

Less than a week later, we conceived. (Sometimes you just know.) And nine and a half months later, the magnolias blooming again and with Tina Turner chanting nam-myoho-renge-kyo, my sweet son was born.

It felt right to have Tina there as an invisible support. She credited her Buddhist practice and daily chanting with getting her through the darkest moments of her life, and guiding her to a place of “indestructible happiness.” I didn’t learn until later that what she was chanting—the sacred title of the Lotus Sutra—is seen as holding the Buddha’s teachings on the nature of life and death. It shows their oneness, and says that when we understand this, we can find a boundless joy in embracing both sides as part of the same unending cycle.

After years in the grip of death, giving birth brought me back to life. My postpartum period was one of the happiest and most peaceful times of my life. Contrary to everything I’d been told about life with a newborn, it was actually pretty blissful. (It helps having a chill baby who sleeps well.) At first this was disorienting; it was hard to even let in so much goodness. Wasn’t postpartum supposed to be hard? I’d been bracing myself for the worst: hormonal swings, depression, isolation, a difficult physical recovery. But when I was met with pure, overwhelming love and joy—and the best physical health and energy levels I’d had in years—I knew not to take it for granted. That joy has become a more constant presence, even as life has gotten more challenging.

While my path to motherhood has been unusually marked by loss, I’ve come to believe that all motherhood carries this paradox: holding both joy and pain; nurturing life while staying close to death. A wise friend told me when I was pregnant that motherhood stretches us further than we think we can possibly be stretched, to hold an almost unbearable amount of joy and pain. When we think we can’t take any more in, it stretches again. We become bigger to hold life in all its beauty and contradiction.

I’ve never been able to separate motherhood from loss, birth from death. And there’s been a gift hidden in that. Grief prepared me to be a mother: to love more fully, to stay present in the hardest moments, to keep choosing and nurturing life. Even on my hardest days, when the laundry is overflowing and my son is having a tantrum because he wants more animal crackers and I haven’t slept well in a week, I still feel the sacredness of it all. I’m far from perfect, but I can say this with certainty: I am a more present mother because of what it took to get there.

Sending love to all the mamas out there: the mothers-to-be, hopeful mothers, mothers in waiting, mothers in mourning, mothers to other people’s children, and mothers whose journey took them to places they wouldn’t have chosen themselves to go.

It’s the biggest and the best work there is.