Last week, as I found myself balling my eyes out in the living room of one of the gals I visit teach, I was gifted with an analogy. Mary talked about how all our children’s transitions feel an awful lot like their very first transition (at birth). And how there are moments when you feel like you can’t go on like this any longer and you have to remind yourself to just focus on one more contraction, just this next one, I can do that. And then one more and so on. I remember being warned about transition in our natural childbirth class. Our instructor said it’s when my will would cave. She assured us there would be a moment, despite our months of preparation, where we would just want to give in to the pain because it would be overwhelming and unbearable. I remember that pain and that moment. I remember crying to Ritchie that I just needed something to make it stop because I couldn’t do it anymore. He looked into my tear-stained face and told me I could do it, that it would just be a little longer and to hang on. I knew that transition meant that the birth of my sweet girl was eminent: a few things would shift and all of a sudden there would be a 10 cm cervix, a pushing mama and a new little person, now separate from me, born into the world. I also remember vividly, the desperation of that moment and trying to talk myself through the hurt because it would be worth it. So my friend Mary, is “birthing adults” and the teenagers that she has try her in a lot of ways. I have other friends who are “birthing teenagers” and here I am, birthing a preschooler. And as I’ve been a fantastically selfish mother, I’m faced, again, with this transition: going from being her whole world, to being a part of her world. The trouble is, she is still and always will be my whole world, so I just keep telling my heart to hang on, this will be beautiful. It will, right?