The first draft of this essay began on June 7, 2025.

You can listen to the essay read aloud by the author as a podcast or read it for yourself below:

My body is twenty-three weeks swollen with my third child, each week my lumbar protesting a bit more as they work to keep my stance balanced as I expand. I stand naked in front of the mirror at night and notice the strangeness of my body, how off-kilter my curves, how miraculously held together. It is really my own body when another lies encased within?  A foreign skeleton gains height and weight and strength each day as my own ribs, pelvis, abdominals, skin are stretched further apart.

As my body grows, so does my anxiety in the face of a birthing dilemma, a stand-off between two choices, neither of which I want to own. In the years I gave birth to my first two daughters, my town had a lovely birthing center, a weigh station between the two poles of hospital births and unattended home births. Nebraska has some of the most restricted birthing laws in the nation and won’t enable licensed midwives to attend home births or to practice outside the direct supervision of a physician. The birthing center was a refuge furnished with four-poster beds, birthing tubs, and the feel of bedrooms that weren’t a hospital with ceaseless beeping machines and sterilized floors that smell of bleach. Yet the center came with licensed medical care, precautionary equipment, and a hospital a few blocks away in the slight chance that intervention was required. The best elements of each polarized option paired together.

Last year the corporate hospital over the birth center stripped the center of its birthing rights, in what my midwife admitted was a money grab. They offered no notice, making the decision without the midwives or expectant mothers being given any voice. They can charge more for the same birth at the hospital than at the birthing center. They also don’t have to keep a specialized roster of nurses on call for birth center births. The flood of questions and protests that ensued in response to the decision went unanswered. Comments on their social media posts were turned off when those of us who felt robbed of our rights voiced our displeasure.

When the decision was handed down, I was not pregnant, but my body entered a triggered state for an entire weekend, anger coursing through my veins to leave my muscles tense; my jaw clenched until my head hurt. I felt silenced, unseen, overpowered. I was outraged over power and money-hungry corporations that didn’t care about the ordinary, every-day woman. They didn’t care about me, despite everything their advertising tried to say contrary.

My husband was befuddled by the strength of my reaction, but I was not. This decision followed a well-worn path in my emotional brain. I learn in some ways to move on from the past, but the past never quite moves on from me. It has been eleven years this month since I left the place I came to call a cult. For years my experience there drove my interior world, often in ways out of my control. PTSD flashbacks invaded my sleep, my cult leader’s voice stayed in my head, doubts and questions and loss lifted me in and out of depression, grief, and eventually determination to get up and try again. It took me the better part of a decade to feel confident in parsing my experience and my faith down to its more basic parts, deciding which ones belonged at the landfill and which ones would compost or regrow to live another day. Feeling powerless, voiceless, used, unseen, or uncared for take me straight back to the cult’s room of bunkbeds where I slept, the gravel drives I walked, the piles of mulch I pitched, the walls of authority I slammed up against until my insides were bruised beyond repair. At the time, I gave in longer than I should’ve. I handed parts of myself away. Now, swaddling my unborn child within the folds of my body, I oscillate between wanting to stamp my foot in screaming defiance and wanting to whimper and plead, please not again.

Part of what made the farm a cult was that it took my power away.

In my leaving and in my recovery, I had to learn to take it back. The truth is no one can take what we don’t willingly give away, but I didn’t know that then. We don’t often know that as reality, especially in childhood when we have less outward power, or in religious organizations where we are trained to submit, or even as adults when we are so habituated to giving our autonomy away that we don’t notice we are doing it. But there is no leaving the child swelling inside my body. I cannot run away from the imminent birthing transition. I will be forced to choose one physical place or another in which that transition will occur. The corporate hospital where I’m supposed to give birth wants me to surrender to their supposed wisdom. They want me to cower before their bureaucratic protocols and decisions to grab for more money. They want me to give my power over to them. And they probably prefer me to do it happily, as if I should be grateful to them. Joyful surrender. That too carries a haunting tone from my cult.

My cult leader used the term “surrender” liberally, presenting it as a spiritual virtue. It was God who wanted my surrender, she told me. If something was hard, I just needed to surrender more. But it was she who wanted my surrender, my capitulation to whatever rule or theology she espoused. If I surrendered, then her autonomy and authority was not threatened.

I still have a hard time with that word. Is it a spiritual principal? A good and whole one? Or is it something masquerading as such? Since the cult, I’ve associated surrender with giving power away.

The first definition of surrender by Merriam-Webster is “to yield to the power, control, or possession of another upon compulsion or demand.” Subsequent definitions include, “to give up completely or agree to forgo especially in favor of another” or “to give (oneself) up into the power of another especially as a prisoner.” These all connotate the giving away of power, of allowing something or someone else to have power over you. It’s a word that comes with the end of a war, one where there is a side that loses and a side that wins. If I surrender, I lose.

Only at the end of the list does the definition include the concept of “giving (oneself) over to something (such as an influence).” I suppose the spiritual experience of surrender is supposed to be this last one, a giving up of oneself to the influence of a higher power, but in my experience it has become too enmeshed with authority figures using it to obtain power over others. The whole concept remains complex, muddled.

Does the word surrender even exist in the sacred text of scripture? Those texts were not composed in English, so the first obvious answer is no. But does the spirit of the concept reside there? I search concordances with mixed results. The King James Version never uses the word “surrender.” Other translations do, but their root words are varied, words meaning to give out, go out, come out, deliver, yield, deliver up, open, or give place. Most of the contexts seems to carry connotations of respect and decision making, a giving away, not a forceful taking.

At its best, is not the process of birth itself a form of surrender?

One where my body delivers and yields, opening up to an embodied way of giving life that has been happening since women first knew existence. It should not be something where I am forced against my will to give or submit to what I do not want.

With my first daughter, I tried to have a birth center birth, but my labor was long and hard. At hour forty-seven I wasn’t as far as I thought. The same excruciating contraction kept traveling up my butt every two minutes without making any progress, and my muscles wouldn’t stop shaking from exhaustion. In what felt like admitting defeat, I transferred to the hospital to get an epidural, something I didn’t want to do, but said I would accept in order to avoid a C-section. I had a vaginal birth but trussed up on a table over two and a half hours of pushing, numb and out of tune with my body and what it was working to do. I tore. I was bloated from IV fluids. I couldn’t sit straight for two weeks. I struggled with feeling like a failure whenever I recounted my birth story, even though my daughter came into the world safe, healthy, and whole.

My second labor, two years later, started off feeling like the first. Twelve hours in, I feared I was stuck and didn’t want to repeat another forty-eight hours. I made the decision to bypass the birth center with the intention of trying pain meds at the hospital. I physically made the long walk from the parking garage to the hospital wing, was placed in a room on a busy day when they had to call in extra nurses, my IV port made ready for the drugs. Yet by the time my veins were ready to be fed, my contractions had shifted and it was too late for the drugs. I labored through the natural birth I originally wanted, just not at the location I would’ve preferred. I literally stood on my own two feet as my daughter made her entrance into the world.

I have confidence now in what my body can do. I’m not afraid of labor. I’ve already proved what my body can do. The second time was so much better than the first. I wasn’t numb. I stayed in tune with the rhythmic pains of my body. I tore less. I wasn’t bloated. I recovered faster. I relished the thought that the third time would be the charm. I would finally get the birth center birth I had envisioned for years. But that chance has been ripped away.

The hospital claims they offer the same experience that the birthing center does, but it’s not true. For one thing they won’t let women go home in four to twelve hours like the birthing center did. They refuse to release the baby until at least twenty-four hours have passed. Rumor has it, if someone tries to leave beforehand against medical advice, they threaten to call child protective services. As if wanting to go home with a healthy baby and sleep in my own bed would make me an unfit mother.

“Has anyone actually walked out and tested them?” I asked my midwife at my first visit of my third pregnancy.

“Not that I know of,” she said. “Usually by that point everyone gets scared and caves and does what they say.”

Part of me wants to be the first to test the challenge. My internal, cult-experiencing self stamps her foot and screams: no! I will not be controlled. Bureaucracy can’t win. I won’t be bullied. But when I share this with my therapist, she cautions.

“You do not want to give CPS a foothold in your home.”

I back pedal a bit. She may be right. Is twelve to eighteen hours of being held prisoner in a hospital worth the chance of allowing CPS in my home for years?

Hence, I remain pinioned between two choices, neither of which I feel comfortable with. A double-bind. I will lose if I challenge the policies, and I will give my power away if I don’t. I don’t feel comfortable with the hospital stay after a birth and I don’t feel confident enough to attempt a birth in my home. There is no middle ground. I am strung between two endpoints.

Last week I visited the woman who was my doula at my first two births. Her calm steady presence and wizened hands stayed with me through two marathons, one fifty-three hours, the second twenty-four. I never would’ve made it as far as I did without her. Yet an auto-immune disease has crippled her ability to commit to future births, illness unpredictably killing her productivity for months at a time. She wrestles under the limitations, as I would. She cannot promise to be there for my third. But she welcomes me into her home and pours me a cup of tea while my daughter plays with a vintage bag of My Pony toys on her living room rug. We talk and watch Orioles come feed off grape jelly she has laid out for them.

“Whatever you decide,” she tells me, “You need to go into it without fear.”

Without fear.

What does she mean by that? What do I mean by it? Embodied, what would a lack of fear feel like? I long for something I cannot even fully define. I have four months remaining to find a stalwart place of courage within me, maybe less. I worry what will happen if the labor pains come and I still feel tossed between options I do not like.

“You can birth at home if you want to,” she says. She herself birthed two of her five at home. “But you have to really want it, feel called to it even. Birth is ninety percent in your head.”

That feels right to me, but my head is a muddled mess. I don’t feel called to either option I’ve been given. Legalities prohibit me from creating a third. I cradle the child within me, as well as the feelings of being torn. I cringe and want to run away and hide from all options. Will my inner being rip and bleed like the flesh of my perineum at birth? Will stitches be able to repair the damage?

My body clock is ticking, the weeks slipping by until I will be faced with some form of choice whether I am ready or not. I don’t think I’m brave enough for a home birth. I want to be. I thrive on the idea of it. I want to be the strong self-assured woman who trusts her body and a natural process enough to do it in my home where I feel safe and in control of the environment. But would I be fully in control? There is a niggling of fear. A what if that sneaks in. Would I ever be able to forgive myself if the what if happened? Is the life of my child worth the risk of claiming feminine autonomy and strength?

Then there are other voices in my life who wouldn’t be onboard. My husband is not comfortable with the prospect of a home birth, and he is my partner in this forming of a human life. I want him at my side, as confident as he can be in a process that is already daunting. Also, to birth at home I would have to either be entirely deceptive to my extended family or confident enough to stand my ground under a barrage of shame and horror that I would attempt such a thing. If I gave birth at home and was healthy and whole afterward, would I still suffer a rupture of trust with my parents? Should these factors even hold sway over my decision? I fear I am just giving more of my power away to the voices around me, the opinions of others, the one-size-fits-all policies of a broken medical system that still tends to view birth as a medical emergency rather than a natural empowered process.

A hospital birth is not the same as a cult, but I internally cringe at the power dynamics. Please not again. What will I do? I fear I will give in. I already am. I’m currently seeing my midwives at the birthing center, now stripped of its power and titled a maternity clinic. My caretakers are wonderful women. They are not the ones I am at odds with. But this means I am indirectly on track and planning for a hospital birth. The labor and delivery I do not fear, but the hospital stay afterwards I do. Will I be strong enough?

My second daughter was born at eight pounds eleven ounces. She was perfectly healthy. But her weight fell into some red-taped category that required blood sugar testing. Every four hours they came and made her tiny foot bleed. We were advocating to go home after just twenty-four hours, but I felt threatened by the nurse. “If she fails a test,” she said, “she’ll have to start all over and you won’t be able to leave.”

She didn’t need those tests. That’s what my mother’s instinct told me. I didn’t have gestational diabetes. My daughter wasn’t lethargic. Nothing was wrong. But I felt I didn’t have a choice in going along with their tests. My heart broke a bit every time they came and made her scream with their pricking.

“You do have a choice,” my doula tells me over our cups of tea that have cooled lukewarm. “They won’t tell you that, and they won’t like it. But you can say no.”

I can say no.

I want to believe that. But can I?

Where am I supposed to plant my feet and stand this time as my child comes into the world? Will my brain be ready when my body says it’s time? Will I feel bullied by hospital procedures that consider me a statistic rather than a story? Or will I somehow garner an internal strength that can politely refuse to submit to legalistic red tape?

I’m still searching for courage to feel like I won’t give my power away.

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Shalom.