Awareness is the key to opening the doors within us.
“I can’t find the cervix,” a neurotic, acneic, 20-something version of me admits, feeling like a shower of shame just soaked my entire being. It was right around this time of year, about 25 years ago.
January is this neglected child of the year. It lives in the shadow of its exuberant sibling, December. Every January since the beginning of my time, I seem to struggle. I am tired in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. It doesn’t matter if I had a good nine to ten hours of sleep. I feel wiped out, lifeless, inspiration-less. I take forever to put Christmas decorations away. I abhor any downtime because it will be filled with my worst fears. I feel overwhelmed by all the leftover tasks from the fall. I need another project to add to my pile of unfinished tasks to give me a dopamine boost, or else I lack motivation to even get out of bed. I am miserable.
My shame back then as a medical student was as intense as my puzzlement at finding myself not being able to perform something I had been able to do so easily a few months prior while in Africa, learning during an elective at the Maternité de Korofina, a life-flooding journey that was so eye-opening, traumatic and blissful that I even considered choosing Ob/Gyn as a specialty. I remember vividly my elation at having reached the stage of being able to estimate gestational age by the power of touch and palpation of a woman’s uterus. And yes, to use the cold duck beak of a speculum to discover this marvel of the human body: the cervical donut.
Maybe this yearly ineptitude or paralysis brought by this first month of the year has something to do with the timing of my arrival in this world. I imagine the overwhelm of my parents who welcomed me, their first, right between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I was also the first grandchild on my mom’s side, and I was x-rayed in utero while my mom was in labor, I guess just to make sure I was not breach. But I wasn’t, and now I wonder, 50 years later, if the level of radiation posed a significant risk to my health. Her own mother, whose first-born, Roger, had severe developmental delay due to brain hypoxia, couldn’t sustain the triggering stress of being by my mother’s side, so my aunt Marie, 19 at the time, saw me being born (and to this day, now a mother of 4, still claims it is one of her fondest memories).
The era my baby boomer parents were in didn’t know the concept of parental leave, so they both resumed their careers shortly thereafter — my mom as a schoolteacher within a month, my dad as a family law attorney within days. From infancy on, I had a string of babysitters including my aunts (Marie, Marielle and others). I was never offered the proverbial breast milk to boost my IQ. I was not walked around in a sling or a baby carrier to hear my mother’s heartbeat. Instead, in Quebec, we used to put babies outside, on the snowy porch, wrapped up in a seat, to help them get “fresh air.” This was the reality of generation X, learning to become self-sufficient from the crib.
I looked up the meaning of January for the first time last week, as if I wanted to understand all of its facets to end the depressive seasonal curse once and for all. January comes from Janus, the Roman god who presided over doors and beginnings. He was also the god of transitions, choices and duality, and is usually pictured with two faces.
In utero, I knocked at my mom’s primal door and it was not ready to open right away. As a healer, I tried to help patients find doors, and I didn’t always succeed. So there I was, in those sickly green scrubs, leaving the exam room, asking a supervisor yet again for help in a hospital in downtown Montreal, where nights blended with days due to my sleep deprivation. Night shifts accentuated my seasonal depressionette, which I survived thanks to my sister’s colorful sense of humor while she quizzed me in the single bedroom of the tiny, dark apartment we shared on a corner in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood. It was across from a subway station and the KFC where she worked (and where a hold up had occurred, thankfully not during her shift).
I remember coming home to try to sleep during the daytime after a 12-hour night shift, completely disoriented, drooling on my textbooks, and not even being able to spell out the harshness of toxic, nasty nurses and shaming attendings. Medical students were disposable. We could therefore be blamed for anything. It was trauma after trauma.
Then, eventually, I was able to reclaim my lost skills. Maybe it was because of a quirky attending who was not tyrannical like the other ones. He looked quite different, more relaxed, hippy, like a disheveled Jerry Rogan. I remember his triumphant “OUIIIII!” when he validated my estimation of gestational age. I remember staying beyond my shift to assist a woman who was close to her forties in delivering her first-born son. I had followed Marie closely during the night and the labor was rather prolonged and stressful. This woman will always be in my heart as she told me, with gratitude, she was glad I was able to be present for the big moment. She had all my admiration for having been both a career woman and a mother.
I had been birthed near a Marie, and I had also helped a Marie birthing. What an honor.
I didn’t end up choosing that specialty for various reasons, but I always felt at ease with the midwifery, the mother instinct, the birth-rebirth cycle, drawing upon my own uterine experiences and using pregnancy and women’s reproductive gifts as a metaphor for so many things, or so many things in life as a metaphor for that blissful, raw gift bestowed on many women in this world.
A few decades after my medical clerkship days, it was as if my unconscious was screaming the same script of despair and shame: “I cannot find the cervix!” I was stuck, again! But this time, it was the cervix to my own rebirth, my renaissance! It was dark, tight, oppressive, cold and lonely and I wanted to get out!
I am proud to say that I exited a difficult 2023 in a better place because I found the door, or rather, its key, after looking for words of wisdom on everyone’s lips. The key to that magical door was in me. Looking back, I understood so much of this past year. I realized that the meaning of life is not what we often tend to focus on: love, parenthood, career, self-realization or even spirituality. These, as blissful as they may be, are not ends in themselves.
Everything we are called to experience is meant to make us more aware. And all these dimensions that we unfairly burden as requirements of making us happy (like relationships or accomplishments) are in fact only means. Pema Chödrön wrote that our suffering is meant to wake us up. Pain keeps us alert.
For me, the next stage is consciousness. Being aware or conscious allows us to accept that pain with grace and equanimity. Therefore, this premise helps me welcome any inconvenience or tragedy with more ease and peace rather than resistance. I become too busy and in awe of the total awareness that visits me, and it will eventually allow joy and gratitude to join.
I became pregnant five times, lost two pregnancies but gave birth to three fabulous soul beings, my three sons. Their passing through me healed so much. The blood of fear, shame and burden was replaced by the blood of life. They changed the scripts of my body, and now make my uterus, this silent organ full of stories, my center of gravity, the shrine of my divine feminine.
My children chose me as their mother and, as soul beings, have been helping me become more alert and more conscious. In their own way, they have reminded me that giving birth to them meant I needed to experience my own rebirth… and I did. Interestingly, through this process, I started reclaiming a name on my baptism certificate that I never used: Marie. How meaningful. A Marie helped me with my first birth, and I later helped a Marie with her son’s, and it was a name I reclaimed through my own rebirth. And I added my children’s first initials to create my own version of the name to transcend the remnant of Catholicism: Mariekya. From Marie Caroline to Caroline Mariekya. From birth to rebirth.
With my rebirth I opened my eyes. My awareness expanded. I came to the realization that pleine conscience, or awareness, is the main character of life, as opposed to the changing décor — the set for the play that is the story of one’s life — and that we often confound it with the main focus of one's life at some point or another, whether it is love, illness, Christmas, travel, boredom, promotion, hardship, birth or rebirth. When we realize that, we can let go of the outcome once and for all and consider that our life is worthwhile and full no matter what is happening (or how it is happening).
When we are aware, we always get something out of a situation, no matter how unpleasant or aversive it might be, and what we do with it. If we are aware, we live. We get to see, to become more conscious, and more knowledgeable of ourselves and the human condition. We open doors inside.
May you be aware and grateful for 2024 and beyond. I wish you all to be reborn in whatever form your heart desires. May you find the “cervix.”
Email Caroline Giroux, MD
