Few things have intimidated me more deeply in my life than this single, profound requirement of birthing a child: complete and total surrender. Ask anyone who knows me; I have spent a lifetime attempting in vain to organize and understand and, often, control everything within my reach. The requirement of navigating utterly unfamiliar depths with acceptance and calm unnerved me. I prepared as best I could (to the extent that one can prepare at all) by way of meditation, until the process of slipping down through the recesses of my own mind became second nature.
I could not have imagined how the experience of labor would sweep me up in a way that rendered any analytical tools—even language—instantly obsolete. It began as a gentle undertow and progressed to an inexorable, world-shaping pressure. Energy pounded through my body, but also pressed and flowed and pulled like fathoms of water.
Perhaps everyone feels this at some point in life. Perhaps it is essential to spend a bit of time deeply in touch with your smallness, with the way you fit into the immense currents that shape our world. It was a threshold I must cross, a step into the abyss I must will myself to take. Is it the simplest and the most difficult task to let go completely, to know that the only way out is through, the only thing to do is breathe, and then breathe again. It is peaceful in this way. Reassuringly primitive.
The surrender, as it turns out, is achievable. What comes after is harder. How does one return from a willing disintegration into an elemental sea, bearing a new and beloved companion? This, I believe, is the greater task of mothers: not to let go, but to return to ourselves.
I painted eight studies and four enormous paintings in an effort to explain this experience. One I cut up on the table saw. One is in the recesses of the storage wall, likely never to see daylight again. Several are beneath the final layer of paint on “The Space Between.” Some of the studies never became large paintings. It is an impossible subject, as impossible to paint as it is to put into words. But this painting persisted, with its balance of mystery and overwhelm and harmony, with a sliver of radiant air above the waves. “Oceanic,” I have learned, may be the only term that does this expansive sea of human experience any kind of justice.