The First Surrender

The Truth Beneath the Craving – By Wandelstorm

🌀 This is the truth beneath a craving I never understood. For years I longed to be pregnant again — not for a child, but for something far older and wilder. This is not fiction. This is memory.

For years, I felt a deep, almost obsessive craving to be pregnant again. Not for another child, I love the ones I have, but I knew my family was complete. This longing was something else. It felt physical, emotional, instinctive; like hunger in my bones. I assumed it was maternal, maybe hormonal. But it didn’t pass. Even after my sterilisation, it returned, stronger.

It wasn’t until I started trying to understand it, properly, with truth, that I began to see it clearly. I spoke the facts. I told the stories. I named the pain. And what I uncovered was this:

It was never about the baby.
It was never about motherhood.

I was craving the one time in my life I had been allowed to fully surrender. I had supressed myself for so long that only something extreme could satisfy what was left. To become the storm that had been held back so for so long. To feel the raw, uncontainable force of something ancient and wild move through me with no apology and no resistance. It was the only time I was not told to be less. The only time I wasn’t asked to hold it in. It wasn’t biology. It was truth.

Once I understood that, the craving left. Entirely. I haven’t felt it since.

But I wrote this to remember, not the reason I thought I wanted to go back, but the real reason I ever wanted to in the first place.

I had several pregnancies. With each one, I was sick from beginning to end. The sickness never lifted until birth. My pelvis ached with a searing pain, like my bones were misaligned, grinding past each other in ways they shouldn’t. Sometimes it would click, shift, and for a brief five minutes, I could breathe again.

I couldn’t sleep. Cramp would seize my legs in the middle of the night. The days blurred into discomfort. And then, labour.

It came like a storm. Always back labour, always precipitous. There was no slow build-up. Just a shift in my body’s gravity, a small twinge that would sharpen in minutes into the moment of birth. The machines couldn’t track it. The monitors showed nothing. The staff didn’t believe me. They said to go home. Have a bath. Come back in the morning. I told them it was imminent. I refused to leave. They dismissed me. One child was born fifteen minutes later. I got a bed five minutes before that. I said, "Three pushes and it will be done." They told me I was wrong. But I wasn’t. It never took more than three. My body didn’t ask. It commanded. And I obeyed.

They didn’t believe me until the last time. Only then did they write "precipitous labour" in my notes.

It was pain, yes. But it wasn’t just pain. It was power. Ancient, wild, uncontrollable. It wasn’t something I did. It was something done through me. Everyone else was calm, breathing, talking. I couldn’t do any of that. I wasn’t present. I wasn’t available. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. I screamed and vanished into it. I was gone. The world did not exist. It was terrifying and it was beautiful. It was the only time in my life the world didn’t ask me to shrink.

No one told me to calm down. No one told me I was too much. They braced for the storm, and for once, no one tried to stop it, no one could have stopped it.

I had panic attacks in the weeks before each labour. Terror would take over my body. I ended up in hospital, silent, medicated, trying to stop my mind from reaching the place I knew I would have to go. I stared at a single point on the wall for days to keep my thoughts still. And still I longed for it. The surrender. The truth. The storm.

The last labour was the most intense. As always, they said I had hours. As always, they were wrong. No one believed me until it was nearly too late. He was born in ten minutes. No control. No pause. Just my body, ancient and certain, doing what it knew. I was gone again, gone completely, screaming into the abyss, wild and absolute.

Because it was sacred. It was the only time in my life I wasn’t a woman in a room. I was the force in the room. No names. No past. Just fire and storm and surrender. Most fear it. But I craved it.

It’s not the pain I want. It’s the permission.
Just the moment I disappeared.
Not into nothing.
Into everything.

I was once real.
I was once wild.
And the world made room for it.

That craving nearly drove me mad. But it wasn’t madness.
It was memory.
And now the craving is gone, not because I found peace.
But because I found its name.
And its name is the storm.

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