This was a bad, hard, exhausting week, just like those weeks of past December. I thought the bad days were over, I thought I was over them – they returned with vengeance.

Nobody warned me that this spiritual awakening or whatever this is would be so painful. Except for, of course they did. Jonah and the whale, all those saints and Leonard Cohen. Anne Lamott: when everything is ugly it’s because something beautiful is being born. The birth is not beautiful in a politically correct sense – you did it twice, how come you don’t remember?

Remember, your son was born with his face turned up – a stargazer, they said. Apparently, it wasn’t “normal”. They were worried. They were about dozen in the room, while you were screaming with pain and effort, bloody, naked, vulnerable and fierce. They were worried, but weren’t showing it. They were professional, you – everything but. Then your son appeared, stubbornly staring up. He started screaming even before he was fully out and they disappeared. You didn’t see them leaving.

Birth is never beautiful, except it always is. You didn’t trust yourself then, you don’t now, you can trust the life force within you. Something is always being born.