It is better to cry
A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman
Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Dear reader, This is my longer monthly essay with a section from my book. I’ve wanted to write for you all week. Each time I sat down to write, my arm injury ached, or someone called my attention. The other day, Abby came home beaming after returning to Cabrillo College. “My first class was great. I really like the teacher, she's from England and she sounds like Harry Potter.” Later, she told me Mr K. in the resource center said it was illegal for her to have an aide in the classroom. “Mom, we have to fix this. Show them my vision report.” Sorted.
Yesterday, I received a message from the fiscal manager overseeing Abby’s DDS budget, the funds designated to support her aides to assist her needs and goals toward independent living as an adult with disabilities. The message read: “Services have been temporarily suspended.” Her aides received the same notice.
They panicked. “Do I still have a job?” Single moms living paycheck to paycheck. “Should I start looking for another job? How will I pay my rent?”
After endless hours spent containing bureaucratic fires, I poured two cups of CBD salts into a hot bath, soaked for 30 minutes, and repeated to myself: “You’re not drowning. We’ll get this sorted. We always do.” One of Libby’s nurses was nearby, heard my cries, and asked, “Can I hug you?”
I am crying for my life, for the story I am about to tell you.
There are oceans of tears women have never cried; we have been trained to carry secrets to the tomb, especially those associated with shame. I was one of the women who considered crying quite dangerous, not knowing what would be unleashed.
The problem with secret stories wrapped in shame is that they sever a woman from her instincts, her natural joy, and freedom. A dark secret in the psyche is untouchable. We protect ourselves from it and turn away from anything that reminds us of it, afraid our pain might intensify. This is a protective mechanism that is not uncommon and secretly influences our choices, our feelings, our relational life, including the interests and people we give ourselves to. As a result, our wild nature is held captive.
Forty years ago, when I was a student of theology and Jungian psychology, I didn’t understand secrets or the need to cry in the same way I do today. Rather than preaching to complete my degree, I staged sacred dramas in classrooms, prisons, shelters, and churches. One of these dramas, “In Silence, Secrets turn to Lies. Secrets shared become Sacred Truths,”1 repeated the haunting refrain, “Don’t Tell.” It received a Liturgical Drama Award for the number of people who felt heard, witnessed, cared for, and stood taller as a result.
Throughout my thirty-year practice, I’ve listened to hundreds of secret stories, mostly from women, though men as well. Generally, the themes are the same: betrayal; forced acts; neglect; jealousy and rejection; retribution and rage; self-harm; disapproved sexual interests and lifestyles; failures; thoughtless interventions and manipulations; abuse. The list is endless, hinging on severe misjudgment and miscalculated consequences.
There is an archetype to the secret. An act takes place, a woman is kidnapped, forced, endangered, isolated, overwhelmed,… No one hears her cries, or her pleas are ignored. She loses hope and connection with the preciousness of her life. She collapses in a blanket of shame, is degraded, and frozen in time. Her would-be heroic triumphs, attributed to prior endurance and intelligence, are stolen to dead-end tragedies.
Through the loss of instinct, she is trapped, powerless to right a horrendous wrong, shamed into secrecy. She complies, afraid of losing love and respect—her value is at stake. Often, though unconsciously, she believes that by revealing the secret, she will be shunned forever.
She forgets there are many people with warmth and love for the human condition, who will draw the secret out. Good people who know that a wound will not heal until it is named and held with care.
“Keeping secrets cut us off from the unconscious…" —Carl Jung
Shaming secrets create a dead zone in our psyche. Until provided succor, we struggle to feel or respond to emotional and relational events. The dead zone is off limits, sealed behind doors and walls, chained with locks of steel. When approached, more walls rise and guards multiply, so the secret cannot escape.
However, our instinctive nature can not be fooled for long. No matter how it is sealed, the secret will find its way out, if not in words, in somatic experience, in depression, addiction, sudden and uncanny fits, physical ailments, conversations that trail off, ending abruptly for no reason, and uncontrollable reactions to life.
Repressing secret material, surrounded by shame, anxiety, fury, remorse, or abasement, effectively shuts down other parts of the unconscious that are near the site of the secret. It is like injecting an anesthetic into, for example, a woman’s womb to perform a C-section. The hips, pelvis, stomach, legs, bladder, and her seat of generative power are also affected by the anesthesia—a continuous IV drip that numbs far more than the targeted site.
What do we do when we find the secret leaking out? We chase it down with relentless effort. We push, bottle, and shove it back down into the dead zone again and build a tighter fortress. We flex our muscles, vanish, or summon our favorite ego-defenders and producers: more, more, more! We collapse hard on our psychic tomb, blood dripping, breath clapping like thunder.
A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman.
In fairy tales, no one asks about the decline or absence of the once vital woman. The families of the dead women in Bluebeard do not come seeking after them. This is not unusual in real life either, when women are entrapped, injured, betrayed, or break patriarchal allegiance, cultural taboos, they are rarely sought after. Sadly, too many women understand this lack of inquiry firsthand. The women who carry secrets are met similarly; the doorbell or phone falls quiet, her circle of friends fades.
And still, a woman's life force can continue to grow even though she is seemingly without a life.
Many times, it is the self-contained, confident woman who is most injured by trauma or by locking up a secret. The woman who doesn’t require much outside of herself to be happy; the woman attuned to the part of the feminine psyche that dances with the wolves, adores humans, and is at peace with solitude.
I know of such a woman. Even though she told this piercing story in her memoir, Edge of Grace, she, her readers, the perpetrators, and the politics of culture may, by accident or by design, turn a blind eye to the evidence of her injury.
This is the work of crying out. The wrongful harm done is consciously apprehended. The site of the wound calls forth restoration.
Here is a real story2. Not a fairy tale with a fairy tale ending.
October 18, 1996. Her life was pierced, ruptured, initiating an ordeal that endures twenty-eight years on.
“Autumn is my favorite season; the cool air is glistening with festive red, yellow, and orange leaves that remind me to harvest this precious time with my toddler. My twins are due in three months. I am twenty-six weeks into my pregnancy when a strong tightening across my abdomen wakes me up. My heart is fluttering. The pain is sharp but bearable; I don’t want to arouse Autumn, she is nestled beside me, fast asleep. I attempt to get out of bed. Her ruby lips are open, colored with my milk, and shaped in perfect symmetry, like a smooth octagon. An angelic glow of bliss illuminates her delicate face.
I slowly roll over, gasp for breath, and muffle the sound with a pillow. After taking a long inhalation, I wipe the sweat from my forehead. I apply gentle pressure with both hands to the cramping in my lower abdomen. A smile crosses my lips as I feel the thrust of subtle movements from the two lives chugging along inside. I push myself up to a sitting position, swing my legs over the edge of the bed, and anchor my feet to the ground. My pelvis aches from the weight of the twins. I make a feeble attempt to push myself out of bed; my body craves sleep. My feet ache, look like puffed-up clouds before a rainstorm, and no longer fit into my size-nine slippers.
Weakening, I fall back onto the violet sheet and notice a few spots of bright red blood where I was sleeping. I turn toward the open screen door of the balcony window and stare blankly out at a gray and orange misty sky. Fishy seaweed aroma infuses the ocean air. Nauseated, I turn away, but the melodious barking of a family of sea lions shakes my trance. I gaze at the long golden eyelashes of my twenty-one-month-old toddler. She has her father’s big blue eyes and resembles Hank in many ways, light complexion and quiet disposition. I’m happy that I didn’t wake her, but I’m unsure of what to do.
The blood spots have dried. I edge my way past a tall wooden dresser that is slightly wider than me, and make my way through a dark, narrow hallway to a second bedroom that is a temporary makeshift office and playroom. The intensity of the sensation passes. I do not see fresh blood. Hank and I haven’t considered preparing this room for the twins. What the heck, they aren’t due until January, and we barely speak.
Halfway down the hallway, I hastily turn back to pull on oversized underpants. I want to protect the beige tufted carpet from a possible blood stain, but I buckle over. I’m struggling to breathe through the next wave of discomfort. Hank has already left the closet where he secludes for morning meditation. He is driving to his office in San Jose. I don’t bother to call him. It would take more than one hour to drive back home on Saturday morning beach traffic. Instead, I reach for the receiver of our push-button phone and press number 3 to speed dial Kym Ann. She lives on the other side of Garfield Park and will arrive soon.
I call Carolyn, our midwife. She tells me that she is in Half Moon Bay attending the birth of another child. As a good midwife, she knows that true delivery dates are rarely exact and is careful not to book clients within proximity. She is sorry that she can’t leave the birth she is attending.
Disappointed, I drop the telephone receiver into a pile of wooden toys, and warily review Plan B, the hospital backup agreement I made with Carolyn weeks before. I brace my body, sink into a cushioned rocker recliner. I don’t want to go to the hospital for a checkup.
I feel baffled, curious, and uncertain after my short conversation with Carolyn. I understand that she cannot leave the birth she is at. And I want her with us. She’s been familiar with us since Autumn’s birth.
She reminded me that our medical backup (Plan B) is not optional. Soon, I will discover that women’s sovereignty is not supported in modern pregnancy.
Memories and questions implode my body. Memories that remind me of Eunice and questions I wish I could ask, receive answers to, and integrate into my current dilemma. What road do I take? Somehow, I know that the spiritual path I’ve been trained to follow has come to a dead end. The women who have gone before were not allowed to leave a trail for feminine autonomy, particularly for giving birth.
Before I met Eunice, my early experience in Catholicism planted a deep-seated belief that the female gender, by definition, is inferior—devalued. I remember blushing the first time I heard the word “Goddess,” as if it were a violation of an almighty code. My mind couldn’t easily register the idea of feminine spirituality and dreaded the idea of a confined role as a mother. Eunice urged us to leave the house of the fathers and the hubris of the male system-builders.
Unworthiness is a trance I’m familiar with, as if an unconscious psychic force insists that I prove myself—I am capable. This force was on board a few weeks before this sudden onset of contractions. I was the parent who walked into the course at Dominican Hospital for parents pregnant with two or more babies—alone, carrying my baby in a sling. Although I am uncomfortable with Western medicine, I agree with this part of Plan B. I sat in the back of the class, bothered, while an assured nurse spouted a list of common complications. The list was long—miscarriages, preemies, C-sections, the babies’ inability to latch on, low birth weight, and bottle-feeding—and raised the temperature in the room, which activated my internalized self-reliant, overcompensating, afraid self. Not me, not me, I puffed to myself, sitting partnerless, as cool as a cucumber, in the back row. None of that will happen to me. I am the proud mother of a home birth with zero complications. Thank you very much. We’re good. Look at us. My baby is nursing just fine. I walked out early as if the song “We Are the Champions” was playing over the loudspeaker just for Autumn and me.
In reality, I went to this childbirth class for twins to learn how to have a successful labor and delivery, and what to do if concerns arise. Soon, I felt the confidence I reaped from Autumn’s natural, ecstatic home birth drain out of me. The instructor spent most of the time covering complications as if these were the common course. Anxiety and doubt covered the room like a weighted blanket. Why lead us to worry? I knew from my work as a yoga instructor that higher levels of anxiety increase stress hormones. In labor, stress hormones chase away oxytocin, the hormone that helps labor progress naturally without intervention. I want to breathe oxygen into my body/brain. I knew the symptoms of trauma, which range from muddled thinking, agitation, numbness, exhaustion, and dissociation to blackout. Feeling afraid did not feel like a good way to approach birth. I reviewed Dr. Bradley’s Method for Natural Childbirth, the book I read when I was pregnant with Autumn. It emphasizes birth as a natural process and helps me relax.
The significance of our women’s circles with Eunice will take time to crystallize in my life. Life cannot take place where women are not involved. We are uniquely different—we have wombs. Eunice spoke of the need for women to join together, clarify our values, and trust our instincts, as was the case for Autumn’s ecstatic home birth. I decided to stay with my yoga practice of deep breathing, eating well, and doing my best to remember what I know deep in my bones.
Back in my bedroom, as the first light of day shines through the manila venetian blinds, the contractions feel light. Kym Ann arrives, double-steps up the stairs, a glass jar of red raspberry leaf tea in one hand, a bamboo basket overflowing with bundles of herbs, books, and bottles of water in the other. She kneels next to me, pulling her full-length skirt above her knees.
“Are you hot?” she smiles as she sticks a digital thermometer under my armpit.
“It’s 99.3,” she reads aloud, setting the thermometer in her bag and tying her ruby-streaked brunette dreadlocks behind her. She smells of jasmine and rosemary mint. Her gentle blue eyes, olive skin, and rosy cheeks come into view.
“My back is burning.”
Kym Ann flips on the ceiling fan, dabs my face and armpits with a cold washcloth, and offers me an ice-cold bottle of water from her ready-to-go bag. She is prepared to travel. By now, both of us have had a brief phone conversation with Carolyn and reluctantly decided that Kym Ann would drive me to Dominican Hospital to check for dilation of my cervix. Everything about my pregnancy has been normal, but we go to the hospital as planned. There is a good chance that I am having Braxton-Hicks contractions,3 which are the body’s way of preparing for true labor. The tightening in my abdomen comes and goes; my body is tired. I’m hopeful that I will be asked to finish out this pregnancy with bed rest.
It’s half past eight on Friday morning when Kym Ann drives us in her blue Nissan through town up Highway 1 to the main entrance of Dominican Hospital. We walk through a glass door that automatically slides open to a neatly organized lobby with signs that direct the flow of traffic. Urgency splinters the air. A surge of adrenaline washes through my body. I want to turn around and go home, but I also want to respect Plan B.
Kym Ann is holding me firmly under the arm, hauling me to the reception desk, where an aging woman with gray hair tied in a bun greets us with a sleepy smile through an open window. She rushes us through the inevitable signing of papers and insurance checks as if there is a long line behind us, but there isn’t.
Kym Ann had called Hank at work. He returned home to make arrangements for Autumn to stay with his parents until we returned from the hospital. When Autumn heard that her mommy needed to go to the hospital without her, she ran around the living room, dumped over a basket of laundry, and tossed her tattered stuffed Piglet and slippers into the kitchen, screaming, “I want my Mommy!” I imagine Hank holding her in his arms, assuring her she would see me soon. When she wiggles free to bang her fists on the front door, calling for Mommy, Hank soothes her with the bribe of a vanilla cherry ice cream from the Polar Bear Parlor.
Registration is complete. A nurse walks me to an examination room; Kym Ann is close behind. Dr. Hopkins, a jovial woman close to my age4 with a gentle demeanor, arrives in a white lab coat. The examination begins at a slow pace with a light exchange about the anticipation of giving birth to twins, tempered with the sober details covered during a prenatal exam. The duration and frequency of my contractions are sporadic and mild. My water hasn’t broken. I easily maintain an ebullient conversation. She begins another cervical exam without telling me why. The mood in the room shifts quickly, growing uneasy. My champion voice perks up, “My first baby was born at home, and you know what?”
Dr. Hopkins peeks her eyes above the glasses that have fallen to her nose, “What?” “She was born in just under two hours. Our midwife barely made it through the door in time to catch her. Her dad almost had to catch her. It was a wild time!” I babble on about how I made pumpkin pies, put them in the oven to bake, the timer went off, and labor began. “Autumn was soon easily born, and we all ate pie!”
Somewhere in the midst of boosting my confidence about birth, the walls tighten. Dr. Hopkins is speaking rapidly to someone on the phone. I’m puzzled—stunned, actually, when I make out that she is arranging to cast me off into an elevator to meet a helicopter. She hangs up the phone, looks at me as if she just got wind of a terrorist in the building, and shudders; “If your babies are going to be born now, we cannot handle the high-risk factors.” Without my consent, she announces, “We are sending you on a helicopter to Stanford Hospital, where they have the best neonatal intensive care unit in the country. You will be there in twenty minutes.”
“Huh? What? Can you repeat, more slowly, please?” I plead. I’m worried, uncertain about what is happening. She doesn’t care that I don’t want to go, that this may be Braxton Hicks. “Not now. We have to go. The technician on the helicopter will explain.” She hurries me down a hall in a wheelchair as if an alarm is sounding and everyone is evacuating the building. But I don’t hear it. The pace accelerates. Dazed, I fade into the memory of Autumn’s perfect birth—craving a fat piece of pumpkin pie covered in whipped cream, and a long nap.
Now I am half-dressed, secured to a gurney, winding through a brightly lit corridor, and whisked into an elevator more spacious than my kitchen. I’m wheeled onto an expansive rooftop, my hair is blown about by a swift wind, my twenty-six-week-old fetuses snug in my ripening womb, with strangers loading us onto an emergency air transit helicopter. Kym Ann skids off; she is not allowed to travel with me. She will call Carolyn and Hank and meet me at Stanford Hospital. I’m alone with blurry thoughts, trying to process a dramatic turn of events. I can’t. I’m scared, a part of me numbing, disappearing, not believing that I am locked in a helicopter.
I do not meet the pilot; he is not visible. A medical technician is at my side, placing earmuffs over my head to protect my ears from the rapidly revolving rotors lifting us up, up, and away from my people. I turn my head to the left and look straight into his eyes. “What is happening?” My voice is muffled. He looks away. I want him to pinch me and say, “This is a routine evacuation practice performed by the hospital, and you have been chosen for the surprise helicopter drill.”
Just six weeks prior, Carolyn had taken me to a first-rate sonographer, Dr. Joseph Frank, in Los Gatos for a certified ultrasound. She takes all of her home-birthing mothers to him as an essential part of her prenatal care. He uses state-of-the-art equipment to produce and evaluate a clear graphical representation of the uterus. His words echo fresh in my mind: “There, you see it; two of everything—the inner sac, the outer sac, and the dividing membrane. You’re doing great. They’re traveling first-class.” Much later, I learned this formation (di-/di) carries little if any complications. More hopeful now that I recall his words, I focus on deep inhalations and exhalations, into my body, into my babies.
I drift, remembering Autumn and abalone earrings. We are at the Monterey Bay Aquarium; she is slung across my torso. Happy not to push a stroller, we nose up to the glass, eye-to-eye with enormous colorful fish, some twice her size. When Autumn sees enough fish, she reaches up with her tiny hand to ding one of the abalone earrings dangling from my earlobe as if it were a bell. This is her way of saying, I am hungry. Not that I need her to ring a bell. We are naturally attached, as if we knew each other before she was planted in my womb thirty-two months ago. She will wean when she is ready. I miss her already, and she misses me. I can tell, as drops of milk leak on my hospital gown. I remember her circling the periphery of my vision, gathering seashells on the beach, feeling the contoured edges in her little hands, gathering colored shapes, and toddling back to sit by my side, one time exclaiming, “Mommy, look! A seashell like your earring.” I reach for my abalone earrings, but they aren’t there. My earlobes are naked, adding to a numbing aloneness.”
Dear Generous Reader,
I leave you with a quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estés5, a cherished mentor.
If a woman desires to retain all her instincts and abilities to move freely within her psyche, she can reveal her secret or secrets to one trustworthy human being and recount them as many times as necessary. A wound is usually not disinfected once and then forgotten, but is tended to and washed several times while it heals.
I appreciate you more than words can hold. Thank you for walking beside me.
If this piece touched you, please tap the heart 💜 and consider commenting and sharing it, so others may find and support my work.
✨ This piercing continues to shape and heal this one precious life. I’m Stayin’ Put, Beauty is Returning. My Autumn is near and dear. I might receive permission to write our mother-daughter story…
With Love, Prajna
To support my work, buy my book, Edge of Grace: Fierce Awakenings to Love, a harrowing and life-affirming story that compels us to recover our most feminine instincts and deep-rooted wisdom.
Ginty (Prajna O’Hara), Boston University Master's Thesis, Sacred Drama Collection, 1981-84.
Prajna Ginty O’Hara, Edge of Grace: Fierce Awakenings to Love. This section is taken from Edition 2, revised in 2023. Chapter 8. Plan B.
Braxton Hicks Contractions: Contractions that feel like a tight band around your abdomen and are normal during pregnancy. These contractions can occur with increasing frequency as you get closer to your due date, and occur more often if you have previously given birth. Braxton Hicks contractions do not open the cervix and do not mean you are likely to have a premature baby. They often occur when you have intercourse, lift heavy items, or urinate. You can have one per day or several, but they do not come at regular intervals.
I was 38 at the time, and later that month, I turned 39.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballentine Books, 1995.
I'm sitting in my chair, thousands of miles away, and can feel the fear in this piece. That's how visceral it is, reaching across. But do you know the line that stood out to me, the one that I won't be able to stop thinking about? The one about you stopping to put on something so that you didn't bloody the carpet. It's the perfect line. The core essence of being a woman is in that line. Beautiful.
Prajna, this piece is riveting, beautifully written, and so human. There are many moments when I stop and take a deep breath.
I'm going to mention this post in my publication. As women, we can achieve success more quickly when we support one another.
I, too, love Jung.