Mary: My Doula as I Labor to Give Birth to my True Self

Erin McCole Cupp shares how, like a doula supporting a woman in childbirth, Mary helps each of us to make way for the person God made us to be.  

My therapist gave me the following homework:  

“Find out who you really are, what you like and what you don’t like, outside of trying to please or impress other people.” 

Fair enough. I’ve done a lot over the years to make myself fit in, get noticed, and be appreciated. I did this by being the first to put myself down so nobody would be scared of me, by keeping my mouth shut about my emotions until I’d intermittently explode, and by doing things for others they could have at least tried to do for themselves.  

I tried to make myself needed, thinking I could never actually be wanted. 

All of this was, of course, exhausting, and I thought I could only recoup by isolating. I labeled myself an “introvert.” I used this as an excuse to hide alone as much as possible, medicating my loneliness with ineffective medicines, like food and compulsive screen time.  

I remember hearing so many times in my life, “Just be yourself, and let people get to know the real you.”  

So I worked on that. I chipped away at my self-medicating behaviors and made space in my life for who I would be without all that false medicine. I got so healthy that I lost 100 pounds, but I also got so healthy that I lost several friends and a whole entire husband in the process. 

Mary knew the risks

It turns out not everyone is going to keep loving you once they get to know you. 

It can be hard to imagine that the Blessed Mother knew and walked boldly into that reality.  

When she gave her fiat and consented to bear the Son of God, she had a lot to lose. She wasn’t just at risk of losing her betrothal to that nice guy Joe down the street. She was risking her life by saying yes to a pregnancy conceived in innocence but outside of earthly marriage. The people who would have stoned her for looking like an unwed mother would not have believed her story, and she didn’t expect them to.    

Even after Joseph stepped up, endangering his own life and livelihood to protect her and the Christ Child, Mary knew her little boy was destined, by virtue of being himself, to irk a lot of very powerful people. By being his mother, she was putting herself at risk by association. 

With all she stood to lose — and did, in fact, end up losing — how was she able to say yes? How was she able to radically accept the person God made her to be, with all the rejection that inevitably brought, with the future she could not see but knew would hold a lot of sorrow?  

Mary said yes anyway

She said yes because she trusted God to make all things right and good in the end.  

She knew she ultimately had far more to lose by being afraid of reality than by stepping off of the path of the nice, quiet life of a consecrated virgin perpetually betrothed to Joseph and into the uncharted wilderness of motherhood to the Son of the Most High God.  

She knew that she’d lose a lot by being her true self, but she trusted that she’d gain a whole lot more. 

That trust was not misplaced. She now has a Son who can never again be destroyed. She now has queenship of heaven. She now has all of us, all these true selves, each a unique facet of God’s precious image. 

Asking Mary to be my doula

So whenever I lose another friend or walk into another space where I am the odd girl out (it turns out God made me the kind of person who likes library presentations, gardening, and historical society events — apparently my true self has the taste of a senior citizen), I ask Mary to be to me what she was to Elizabeth in the last three months before the birth of John the Baptist.  

Mary helped Elizabeth give birth, just as a doula supports a woman through the pain of labor into the joy of the birth. It’s painful for me now, but I have Mary to hold my hand as I walk into those new places where I can be who I really am.  

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Copyright 2024 Erin McCole Cupp
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