While I was giving birth to my first child, my mother was having a panic attack. I’d never known my mother to have a pathological response to anything. Even when her younger sister was dying, she took it upon herself to remain strong for everyone else, and then the morning her sister died, my mother went home, shut her bedroom door, and wept until there were no more tears left. But when my husband informed her that I was experiencing some bleeding while giving birth to her first grandchild, something inside her came loose.
My sister was with her and says she’s never seen my mother, a physician and seasoned meditator, behave the way she did. “Suddenly, she wasn’t there,” my sister says. “I could tell something was terribly wrong.” According to my mother, those eight hours in which she waited for me to give birth were the most terrifying hours of her life. “I genuinely don’t know how I survived it,” she says. “The only thing I could do was try to focus on my breathing.” Several hours in,…
