Reflections On Birth
By Dara Horn


Because my daughter almost died while she was being born, they took away the mirror. The mirror, as every modern mother knows, is an essential accessory in a hospital birth. Now that the pain of delivery is easily avoidable if you choose to have an epidural, a mother-to-be can actually open her eyes long enough to see her baby being born. I was a first-time mother, and I had looked forward to this. I could hardly wait to see the miracle with my own eyes.

My labor experience was so uneventful that during its initial six hours I went to a movie, dinner, and a flamenco concert before even thinking about going to the hospital. And once I received the anesthesia, it remained so uneventful that I spent the subsequent six hours sleeping and playing board games. When it came time to deliver, a perky labor nurse hauled out the mirror as planned, and I prepared to witness my baby's birth.

But then the doctor examined me and whispered something to the nurse, and suddenly the mirror was whisked away. As medical staff multiplied in the room, the doctor explained that my baby was being strangled by its umbilical cord and that I had less than an hour to deliver before an emergency C-section would be necessary to save the baby's life. I looked down and could see nothing but my enormous belly under my hospital gown, blocking my view. I pushed, blindly, for 20 minutes--and then the doctor held up a baby.

My first reaction, of course, was relief and joy. But to my surprise, my happiness was accompanied by a strangely disturbing thought: I had no idea where this person had come from because there had been no mirror. The miraculous moment when my body became my daughter's gateway to the world would remain invisible to me.

During the months that followed, I realized that my daughter herself was the miracle (like all children), and her birth was an enigma--a mystery inaccessible to the eye. I was reminded of the Jewish tradition of covering mirrors after a death and began recognizing that there are certian moments we will never truly see. How can it be that a person who just existed suddenly doesn't? And how can it be that a person who never existed suddenly does? In these most profound mirrorless moments, there is no explaination to illuminate what we cannot see.

Now there is a baby living in my home, and because of that mirrorless instant I still can't quite envision how she got here. My life feels as new as hers, fraught with awe, astonishment, and fear. But being utterly deprived of sleep and energy, I have little time to reflect on the mirror, to examine all my thoughts and emotions.

When I held my 4-month-old daughter up to the mirror, she laughed at the other baby she didn't recognize as herself. Watching her look at her reflection, I realized in a small way she understood something I didn't--that the girl in the mirror wasn't really her and never would be. The mirror in the delivery room could not have shown me where she came from. Nothing could.

In pregnancy we're led to believe that we can know everything about our children, from their gender to the contour of their faces. But in life after birth, we begin to realize we'll never be able to see how our children will turn out, who they someday will be.

So we hold them in front of the mirror, and we wonder!