Something I find very interesting about the story telling from commitment piece is how long it took. I spent an hour talking about things I wouldn't have even bothered to say when telling the story as a whole. At most I might have spent a minute or to making a nod to them.

When I'd looked at the picture before, the drive to the doctor's office didn't seem significant. I'm curious now how time will flow as I get deeper into the story. Its mostly a blur at this point, but as I walk through it slowly I expect it will continue spreading out and getting clearer.

Upon paying more attention to the car ride, I'm realizing some significance. I spent the night before the car ride, and the car ride itself, having a huge internal battle. I was *really worried* that I might be going into premature labor. I was also very self-conscious about over-reacting, which I'd certainly had my share of. The car ride was spent with alternating internal antagonism about either not being proactive enough or being so over-reactive, with increasing intensity.

I still have a knot of emotion that arises with this period. Anger at myself for having been in denial. Anger at myself for not haven assessed the situation better, and see that this was different from other alarms that turned out to be false. Self blame.*

When I flash on this part of the journey, I alternate between trying to give myself some slack, and telling myself how stupid I was, and how I might have saved the pregnancy if I had been faster to action.

During most of the process, while it was awful, I was sure I was proud of myself for biting the bullet and rising to the challenge of the pain, and asking for more in exchange for giving my child more time. I was determined to hold off the labor long enough that I'd be able to go full term. So it makes sense that this part of driving after a night of labor signs is significant, because its a place where I can blame myself. And where the experience itself was a frantic battle between one type of blame and another, accentuated by physical contractions.

* _{I do know plenty of counter-arguments, and use them with myself. And I do intellectually give them a lot of weight. I'd never been pregnant before and didn't know what was going on. I'd contacted the midwife right away and was following her notion that it probably wasn't a big deal but to go to the doctor in the morning just to be safe. The place where I really blame myself is for not taking action during the night, when the contractions were getting more regular. I just kept telling myself to stop freaking out and go back to sleep.}

I was working with my personal coach/counselor/psychologist/physical therapist/mentor person, Susan, with the intent of continuing with the iceberg that came out of the water working with Sofia. Susan is brilliant. She kept slowing me down, checking assumptions, having me speak about the things she did that I found irritating, the things that I have self judgments about, and she was able to firmly hold the space.*

We decided to go through the story of what happened in detail, switching between story and exploration. We started at pregnancy a couple of weeks before I went into labor, and got as far as the drive to the doctor's office. I remembered way more detail, especially visual and tactile, than I've ever tried to put into words. Its very vivid. When consciously recalling it, I realized that I've been having flashes of it at low levels of consciousness for years, even just these seemingly mundane details, I know them very well.

I'm actually building trust with Susan, which is pretty amazing. There's a certain point to which I'll open up with pretty much anyone. People are often impressed by how open I am, but they have no idea what I have going on underneath what I actually express. Susan was able to get past the bullshit to the underlying dialogue, to where I felt like everything I was saying was something that I would firmly stand by. I also found myself talking in metaphor naturally, as opposed to trying to grasp at something. With coaching there is often a need for metaphor to describing feelings and sensations, which we don't have words for: "what is that sadness like?". This is the first time talking with another human being that I've had where I felt like I was talking straight with someone on a fundamental level, and they actually got what I was trying to say.

*_{coaching terminology that means something along the lines of making people comfortable}

After getting loosened up with a couple hours of yoga in the morning, I was riding in the van heading off to lunch with a few other women, in the back of a minivan.

It turns out that the two in the front were facilitators for birthing classes. I was actually signed up for a birthing class. I gave birth two months before it stated (my son was 3 months premature), so I never attended. I'm bitter about this. And I get angry whenever I hear about natural/healthy births in general.

Being in a rather raw state when this conversation came up, I started crying. Quietly to myself. And then someone turned around and saw me and asked what was up, and then I started sobbing uncontrollably. Later I did more work around it in class, and did even more uncontrolled sobbing.

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