Day 19: Womb
As a teenager I slept in the same room where I was born.
It wasn’t a hospital room. It was my bedroom.
Fifteen years earlier, my mom spent 40 hours in and out of that room during labor, waiting for me to come out. Finally, on a raised futon in the corner, she gave birth. And my dad caught me.
There was no doctor present. Only a midwife. I’ve seen many pictures from that day. Everyone looks happy. Tired, but happy. My mom glows.
Four years later it happened again. My brother was born. We were in Japan this time, not Hawaii. And a different midwife held my mom’s hand through labor. I sat in the corner, waiting, watching.
My mom later became a midwife herself, delivering hundreds of babies in homes across the world.
So for me, birth was everywhere growing up. Many of her friends were midwives. Whole shelves of books were devoted to pregnancy and delivery. Symbols were scattered throughout the house: wooden figures with bulging bellies from indigenous cultures, woodblock prints of nursing mothers, slings and baskets and backpacks designed to carry newborns.
Unlike me, my brother came out screaming.
My mom had been a relaxed graduate student in Hawaii during her first pregnancy (mine). But her second was filled with the stress that came with buying a house and moving overseas.
I had been a quiet, happy baby. But my brother threw tantrums almost daily, from birth until his teens.
And while I was obliging, did my homework, and followed all the rules, my brother rebelled both in school and at home.
For a few years in my early twenties I was fascinated with personality types, thinking if I could just identify my “type,” I’d finally understand who I was and why.
I thought if I could just fit myself into one of these pre-defined categories, I would know how to proceed with my life. I’d be able to sort out my motivations, my fears, my strengths. I’d know what to do for work, and what kind of partner to look for.
But in the years since that obsession, I’ve I was using those personality systems as a substitute for truly exploring and understanding myself.
I latched on to 2-3 “types” that matched what I knew about my personality. And then I used those types to try and define myself, reaching and stretching to conform the rest of my personality to the traits they were supposed to have. I began to act out the personality type, rather than being myself.
One thing I wasn’t doing was looking into my own personal history and exploring the forces that shaped me.
My brother and I have such different personalities. Is it as simple as saying I’m an INTP and he’s an ESFJ?
I don’t think so.
I have begun to explore the experiences that shaped my life. What influenced me as a young adult, as a teenager, as a child?
It is a process of removing boundaries. Of peeling back the hard outer layers until you find the soft core exposed, vulnerable, and malleable by the world around it.
As I move back in time year by year, I find an increasingly sensitive and perceptive young human. A person wide-eyed with curiosity, senses not dulled by the pain or hardships of later years.
And I have come to believe that these questions don’t stop at birth.
If you’ve ever felt a baby kick from inside its mother’s belly, you know that even in the womb we are aware and sensitive to the world around us. Perhaps more sensitive than ever. Only the “world” around us at that time of our lives isn’t the outside world. It is our mother’s inner life.
In other words: If you want to know yourself, get to know your mom. Because that’s where “you” began.