Surrendering to snow days

When birth is a blizzard

We’ve been snowed in all week. On Monday a wet blanket fell onto the hillsides and by morning the deep white had turned to blue ice. Temperatures peeked above freezing briefly on Thursday, only to plummet again, locking even more of the road into a luxurious layer, thick as cut crystal glass.

We’ve had to make our peace this week with not being able to go anywhere. With not having the family members who normally help us with childcare, with shrinking our world to the size of the wood stove in our living room, the long rectangles of the skylights above us, the rim of our bowls of soup.

There’s a bending that must happen to the winter. A bending that must happen to nature.

A bending that must happen to the things that are, blessedly, frustratingly, divinely, out of our control.

I remember how hard this was for me two years ago, when I was nine months pregnant, and the snows came again and again and again.

We had planned on a home birth, knowing that, if weather came, we’d be unable to get out if we needed to.

And so every time a snow came in that last month (and they did, over and over) we had to ask ourselves—do we leave? Do we stay? Do we park the car down in the valley and hope I’m able to walk? Do we put chains on the tires and pray?

Every time the snows came, I curled my entire body (and the body inside my body) into the palm of the world and repeated—I trust you.

I said it, not because I already trusted—it’s hard to trust life, especially when there’s been moments of your trust shattering like dry ice—I said it because I wanted to trust.

Because I knew I had to learn how to trust. Because I knew that this is what the passage into motherhood is. That this is what birth asks you to learn…

To trust something you have no control over.

To trust the weather patterns that come in and rock, rock, rock your tiny home.

To trust that there is a benevolence that sees you, no matter how many snows blind the sky.

To trust that you are significant amongst the insignificance.

That everything that happens to you is significant—no matter how shattering it may be.

After the birth, there was a lot for me to process. All of the many things I had to bend to. A snowstorm, both literal and metaphorical, that I ended up having to walk out into the middle of and surrender to.

Around my daughter’s first birthday last year, I reached out to a birth trauma specialist to help me work through the triggers I felt pushing up like frost heave in the soil beneath me.

When the final snow came—the one that we eventually had to trudge through after three days of laboring with COVID, making our way to the hospital after I surrendered to the knowing, as certain as snow settling against the door, that I simply couldn’t do it anymore— I sunk into a state of acceptance that was so similar to a state of freeze I didn’t know the difference anymore.

As I talked to the therapist about the series of hardships, icicles on the eaves, that came up in the days, and then hours, leading up to my daughter’s birth, I kept circling back to the snow.

First, it was the snow that fell and trapped us.

And then, it was the crush of the snow beneath the chains on our tires when we knew we had to leave.

And then, the sound of my voice laboring in the cave of the car as we crunched over the mountain pass.

And then, how the whole world was so miraculously, beautifully lit the day after her birth.

Gazing out from my window in the maternity ward, everything was as white as angel down. My baby was swaddled in starched blankets and the mountains were ringing, like a crystal bowl sings when touched.

So we worked with the icicles, the crunch, the blizzard, the snowfall, and the angel light. We worked with the weather of what had happened.

The weather, all the weather, that is always beyond our control.

And at the end of our work together I told her, amazed, that when I closed my eyes now and thought about those days, all I saw was sunlight on snow.

Not the hot fear in my belly when I came down sick COVID in the days before her birth. Or the powder on the Earth that looked deadly to me while I paced for hours. Not even the bright lights that had to come on at the moment of her delivery, making sure we were both ok.

Only sunlight on snow.

I touched the memories inside my brain and turned them, like a crystal in sunlight, and suddenly I could see my daughter’s birth differently, could see if for what it was—a blizzard of light.

Now, this year, on this snow day, while my daughter and I build blocks together by the woodstove, I gaze out of my window at the snow and it melts me.

It melts me into acceptance.

Into surrender.

Into the intensity that is also joy, the sorrow that is also depth, the pain that is also wonder.

I gaze out at the snow and accept the snow days.

Because snow days, in whatever form they come, are just another opportunity to surrender into the light that is always falling here to Earth.