As a nurse, I have had the unique privilege of witnessing both birth and death. I have noted time of birth, and I have noted time of death. I have provided newborn care, and I have provided palliative care. I have been witness to the great span of human vulnerability. When are human beings more vulnerable than in dying, being born, and giving birth?
The female body, by virtue of its fertility, is particularly vulnerable to insults of its physical integrity. I have seen a woman bleed from her hospital bed to the tiles on the floor shortly after giving birth to her ninth child, only to survive thanks to an emergency hysterectomy. I have taken care of a woman with mastitis so severe that it caused abscesses in both rock-hard, fire-engine-red breasts. Tearful, febrile, and unable to raise her arms, she still let her toddler climb in bed with her to be comforted. Sometimes the vulnerability comes in the form of a new mother simply needing help to stand for the first time after birth. Wiping the blood off of her legs, I hold her steady as she walks to the bathroom. I have held women’s hands while other hands have pulled blood clots out of their uteruses to stop hemorrhaging.
Sometimes, I am the only one helping these women. There is no husband or boyfriend present, no mother, sister, or friend to be seen. This is additional form of vulnerability beyond that of our shared corporality and the specific vulnerability of the female sex. It’s a vulnerability of relationship. Sometimes this lone mother doesn’t even speak English—a vulnerability of language and geography.
The word “vulnerability” conveys risk, whether physical, social, or emotional. Vulnerability thus inspires caution. It comes from the Latin word “vulnus,” which means “wound.” Yet there is often a reward to the risks we take and the wounds that we endure.
I know this, because I have not only wiped blood and held hands. I have also handed women their babies for the first time. I have helped mothers give their babies their first baths. I have taught teen moms how to buckle their babies into their car seats. I have guided moms to latch their babies to their breasts for the first time and seen them laugh in relief and joy. I have watched these women witness their husbands becoming fathers. I have seen the rewards in real time, often with the same women who I have seen suffer or struggle just the day prior. I weep a little as I write this, remembering each of these women. I recently decided to step away from nursing, at least for now, to raise my own babies. The opportunity to take in the truly immense capacity of women to hold not only suffering and risk but also gratitude and great joy has been such a gift. Experiencing this over and over—for years—has granted me awe for the power of the women I walk amongst.
Many people operate on the assumption that the vulnerability of childbearing is a net negative. I have learned that it is a source of power.
What Is Power?
Power is impact. Power is reach. Power is influence. Power is liberty to live as we desire. Lastly, power is legacy. Many would say power is wealth, but wealth is a mere vehicle to all listed above. It is a tool that power utilizes.
Is courage in times of vulnerability not the energy through which we gain this power? Is grace in vulnerability not an admired trait, one that earns respect, a component of power? And is humility in vulnerability not the power to perceive oneself honestly? Human and humility have the same root word: humus, meaning “of the Earth.” To be human is to be vulnerable, precisely due to our Earthly nature. If we were not susceptible to physical, emotional, or social wounds and failures, we would have no incentive to be conscientious. Without our vulnerability, we would have no incentive to be careful.
An awareness of our own mortality and vulnerability inclines us to make decisions that are advantageous for not only ourselves, but for vulnerable others. In this way, vulnerability orients us toward the future. It acts as a social mediator, reminding us of our interconnectedness. Perhaps an even more accurate term would be intercorporeality: our openness to relating to one another through our bodily entwinement and emotional entanglement.
Caring for those who are more obviously vulnerable than we is a reminder of how vulnerable we ourselves are. I believe that this reality contributes to the low status of care work. People do not like this reminder. When I witnessed people die, I was faced with my own mortality. When I witnessed women hemorrhage when I myself was pregnant, I worried that I too would bleed too much. When I cared for demented elders, I was reminded that one day I too may not recognize my own children, that I too might cry for my mother like a little child. When I injected epinephrine into the leg of a middle school boy as he coughed and struggled to breathe, I realized that I didn’t even know if my own child was allergic to bees or wasps. Even changing a diaper is a reminder that we are mere mortals. There is nothing quite like bodily fluids and functions to take one down a notch.
The knowledge that we bleed, that we are fragile, frightens many people. But those who can face these realities head on through the hands-on work of caring for others receive the unique power of true material understanding, knowledge of intimacy beyond the romantic, and a felt sense of the preciousness of life lived in the human body.
The Risk—and the Reward—of Female Fertility
These power-making facets of women’s lives are all tied to the vulnerability of our reproductive lives. If we do not take the risk of sex, the risk of pregnancy, and the risk of childbirth, we lose many of these things.
Women birth and raise the lawmakers, the farmers, the military, the surgeons and artists and storytellers and saints. Some may scoff and say this is no accomplishment because it requires no special talent to get pregnant. Yet biological reality is the necessary foundation of all human existence. Sex, birth, and death are the driving forces behind much of human behavior. Women’s biological work is the work of human survival. It is the only ground from which human excellence can grow.
I personally have never felt more powerful than in giving birth and putting my babies to my breast. Lying back with closed eyes, I have a renewed understanding of my place within the vast collective of humanity—living and dead. This was not because I felt triumphant (although I did), but because I felt a sense of belonging to all mothers who had experienced the same.
There is something about holding and beholding life in your arms—life that was crafted within you—in those liminal moments after birth that gives one a rare glimpse of the vast and storied and complex heritage of human life. In looking down at that baby, we are every woman who has ever looked down at their newborn baby with relief and triumph and gratitude. In hearing their first cries, we know that we are needed. It is a comfort that the needs of our babies aren’t different from the needs of our foremother’s babies, but they are also uniquely ours. It is in these moments of rocking a fussy baby to sleep, as we simply do what has always been done, we move in a way our ancestors would recognize. We have a sense that we are right where we are supposed to be, doing the thing we are meant to be doing.
There is a power in knowing that we are in our rightful place doing our rightful task. In childbearing, the risk and the vulnerability of embracing that risk leads us to that place. As our babies rest their little heads upon our chests, our heartbeats tell them “I’m here. You’re here. This is where we are both meant to be.”
My youngest child is fourth months old. On a typical day, I wash dishes, nurse the baby, start folding laundry, nurse the baby, prepare breakfast, nurse the baby, eat cold breakfast, do more dishes, hold the baby with one arm while I fish my five-year-old out of the tree he is stuck in, nurse the baby, and then finish folding the laundry from two hours ago. There’s a lot of forced rest. There’s a lot of starting over. There’s a lot of interruption, of putting down what I’m attempting to finish. My inner landscape is similarly disrupted and distracted. Thoughts get stolen. Tasks get forgotten. It can be frustrating, but it is okay.
Our culture struggles today with being okay with what motherhood is, because being okay with this means I accept that I am not a machine. Machines are not vulnerable; they are efficient, utilitarian, and streamlined. The vulnerabilities of childbearing and the day-to-day realities of childrearing make an efficient, utilitarian life impossible to achieve. Mothers do not function in this way. They cannot.
Yet there is power in rejecting a life of constant striving after efficiency and accomplishment and never being satisfied. Perhaps the ultimate power of the vulnerable female body lies in the friction it provides: its resistance to the strange and distorted desires of an increasingly mechanistic and technocratic society.
