My 40 Truths #2 You can stand anything for 10 Seconds (aka How I Made It Through 31 Hours of Labor)

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Have you seen the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? It's fantastic -- think a teenaged girl is abducted in the 90s and kept in an underground bunker for over a decade by a doomsday cult and is eventually freed to live a life of a struggling millennial in modern-day Manhattan. Also, it's a comedy.

It was one of my favorite shows in the summer of 2017 where I got one of my favorite resilience mantras: "You can stand anything for 10 seconds." This applies to a multitude of things inside a doomsday bunker -- I won't ruin the show for you -- but essentially it helps Kimmy keep her spirit, and the spirit of others up, even when they're going through extremely shitty situations.

I've used this mantra consistently since then to weather through difficult situations: whether it be standing in the line for just one friggin cup of coffee, to getting my molars filled - slash - extracted, to going through labor. Okay, that escalated quickly, but hear me out, that's how versatile this mantra is.

Now I have a pretty high tolerance for pain but from everything I have heard, even the hardest of women break at the prospect of childbirth. Everyone cusses, everyone cries, everyone yells at their husband. I felt pain, for sure, at one point I was crying through tears while fervently trying to inhale laughing gas on hour 30 of our 31-hour ordeal. But I didn't really cuss, I and was very nice to my husband (and he'd better corroborate this or else).

But just when I was about to hit a breaking point during a contraction or during the time the stuck a needle down my spine for the epidural, I thought, hey, let's just count ten seconds, you can stand anything for ten seconds. And the thing rarely lasted more than a few rounds of ten. Before I knew it, ten seconds stretched to 96,720 seconds and the Filipina nurses outside my room were frantically saying there was no way I would dilate any more and that I have to ask for a C-section -- the previous shift nurse forgot to tell them I understood Tagalog. So I said heck, let's do this, cut me open. The rest is history -- my giant baby Teagan came out and everyone was like, we shoulda done this earlier, blah blah blah. In the end, I look back, and I don't think I would have done anything differently.

And as a new mom, especially a new mom coming back to work, I still use this mantra as much as possible. During the late nights when she was a newborn and wouldn't settle down, I would walk up and down our hallway rocking her to sleep for ten seconds at a time even if I desperately needed to sit down and sleep. I could wait for hours to tick down 'til I need to go home ten seconds at a time. I could wait for her to soothe herself to sleep for ten seconds at a time.

In the years to come, I hope I get to teach this mantra to my baby so that she'll build that tolerance as she grows up. At the very least, I hope she can learn to wait ten goddamn seconds for me to clean up her poop without throwing a fit.

31 Hours Later and still smiling! I passed out directly after this pic!