What gives you that last ounce of strength? What makes you reach for the impossible and win? What gives us the ability to tap that secret cache of power we all hold. What enables us to survive. To push through when the odds are so stacked against us it feels like hail in our faces. 
My friend, who looks after her aging father, told me yesterday that he fell and she caught him, he is 200 pounds, she is my size, she caught him and held him up for as long as it took for him to get his feet from out under the fall so she could lower him to the ground safely. She said this was about 6 or 7 minutes as he struggled but felt like an age. But she did not drop him. She found an untapped strength that both frightened and amazed her.
This strength is in all of us. Me picking up an 80 pound calf in a fury and carrying her to another pen. Working through the night for night after night pouring drops of fluid down their throats. Falling asleep in the truck parked outside the house but roaring out at the first sign of trouble. Your child climbs a stacked set of chairs in an unfamiliar hall and on pure instinct you spin and you cross an impossible expanse , timing a dive to catch him as she and the chairs inevitably fall. 
Once, a while ago now, I was walking from my neighbours house back to mine after our morning cup of tea. (This was at Massey University in New Zealand.) We both lived at the bottom of an orchard on the university campus. I was walking with a wee baby in my arms, one in my belly and one at my hip. It had rained for weeks and my neighbour and I had constructed a strange path of planks of wood through the mud between our houses. We had been walking this for days. Laughing. But the planks had become slippery from our muddy bare summer feet. And as I hurried past the chook house with this tiny wee baby in my arms and another trotting close behind. I fell. I fell hard. My neighbour saw me fall and as she rushed towards me she watched me woosh up into the air, out of control, screaming, spinning and falling from the crazy wooden bridge through the mud, holding the baby and knocking, then simultaneously scooping up, the toddler behind me. As she watched in horror she saw my body spin, my legs fly up in the air, my arms fly out losing and then catching both babies back out of the air, then landing on my back with a thump, hard, but with both of the babies safe on top of my body. My arms around them. Safe. I lay thereon my back, in pain and and laughing with relief.
She ran to us, her own baby bouncing on her hip, picking us up. We were weeping and laughing with relief, amazed that I had landed with both babies on top of me. That we were safe.
I started to bleed the next day. The baby tucked safe in my belly died a few days after. He was only tiny. It may have been the fall. I think so. Many of us have had miscarriages – some of us have had late ones – very few of us talk of them. Many of us have had more than one. I don’t know why we are not allowed to talk about it. To be allowed to get past the wall of a lost baby. Losing a baby holds a plethora of guilt and shock. I still feel like slapping the cold nurses. Slapping everyone. As I was letting my invisible baby go they were worried about my tears, where did I keep the brushes, your hair is such a mess, do you have someone to come and take you home. No, I said, there is no-one. My husband was working you see. And my hair is always a mess. I will call my neighbour. But we rise from it – this is part of the awful terrifying strength of women – especially wild women. Like us. Like you. And me. Full. Wild. Awful. Full of AWE. AweSome. Fuck off wild.
This is the strength of a woman and don’t you forget it. Don’t you ever forget it.
Inside us all is this superhuman strength. Men seem to be able to tap into this physical strength easily. This incredible timing. This dance. Women need to fight for it now. This free fall that is life. Relying on our bodies. We forget to rely on our bodies. Old or young. We all have the ability to grab the rungs that flash past us as we fall. All of us have the strength in our fingers to hold on and stop the fall. Then drag ourselves back up. Rung by rung.
Really, not only metaphorically.
We all have it. Dig in. Life is ahead. And don’t you ever fucking give up. Ever. Not EVER. 
Trust yourself. Trust your instincts. They are old.
Love your friend on the farm
celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
82 responses to “What makes you strong?”
I am so sorry that some of the medical profession did not do a better job. I am one of them, a nurse, and I have cried with mothers who have lost so much and told them to be happy they had that little part of a life before it was taken away and to not let anyone put them down because of it. We all grieve in our own way and lots of medical personal are afraid if they show a softer side they won’t be able to cope and go on so they display a harsher side than they should to cope with their own feelings. Sad but true.
Please continue to remember and never let the love you had for that baby be forgotten. It was a gift but God that didn’t mature.
Thank you.. and I do know that nurses work so so hard (I was one for a while in my small way) and we have to go on.. to cry with everyone would break your heart.. c
This is an awesome post.
I think I’d like to sit with you on a porch and watch the night roll in. Sending you strength, should you need it at this moment or any future one. Reason has no space to admonish feeling. The facts and the logic and the shoulds hold no power over the grief and the sorrow and the cycling “what ifs.”
It’s odd, the things we don’t talk about. It’s odder to me yet when no one needs to be told we don’t talk about certain things. No one needed to tell me not to talk about my loss. I simply felt I shouldn’t. I also felt that to do so would hurt so much more than to hold it secret and sacred.
Hi C, I always come for a read when I have a hiatus; now that I’ve read your story today and looked at everyone’s comments I’m ready to power on again. Thank you. E
I’m sorry about your miscarriage. I cannot imagine how you felt and feel. I guess guilt is instinctive in some situations but it really doesn’t sound like there was anything you did wrong or could have done differently. And I’m sure that to this day the children in your arms are grateful to you for protecting them the way you did.
Out of the blue sometimes, your eloquent prose reaches deep in my gut, breaking through a tough exterior. These words are some of your finest, my wild-heart friend.
My instincts have never failed me, even when they reveal that which I’d rather not know or see. But instinct is there for a reason.
And, hope. There is always hope.
What a great introspective piece.
This is one for your future book of essays on life, farms, family, and living. Solid good.
I had a choice of dropping my small sleepy daughter as I was carrying her rushing downstairs as a tornado was almost to us, or falling very hard. Sadly lost that one.
There is some deep rooted strength that women trap into. How sad it is when there are those who do not see it when they need it – or why some choose to give up instead of taking hold
Celi, this is an excellent post. One I need very much. I was manipulated into an abortion in my younger years which turned out to be my only opportunity for a child of my own. The meditation hall I sit at is having a service to remember children who have died. Would it be all right with you if I read this post to them? If I have the opportunity?
I lurk from work, so I will check back to see if you have commented.
Thank you so much for writing this post; for being the you who could write this post. Thank you for encouraging me to face the razor edge of my fears and fight for myself and the world.
Leah
I would be honoured if you were to read this .. truly.. thank you so much for thinking to do this. and every time you rise up to fight darling Leah, we fight right next to you.. love c
Thank you, Celi. I am just starting to get that, that I am never alone, that I never was alone. I just felt that way! I pray I have the opportunity to read it and it helps someone else as it has helped me.
Leah
Just lovely.. let me know how it goes if you do?.. c
You’ve made me cry this morning, Celi. It’s OK. It was EXACTLY what I needed to hear. Picking myself up out of the current muddy wallow and getting on with it. Thank you, my friend.
(PS: I knew I was pregnant, only once, I never made it past 6 weeks.)
Love, love darling Lynda.
I’ve just caught up on this post. Oh, it’s so strong, tough and vulnerable all at the same time. I have tears inside me as I read this sad story.