FIRST & Last Breath
Any moment my beloved little girl will make her way through the birth canal and arrive into this world. Last night’s dream was a moment between her and me. I was communicating with her that she would be leaving her watery warm home in my belly and making her way out into this world. As I imagined this for her from a place of deep motherly love, I was aware of the grief that began to overtake my heart. How beautiful she feels the world is as she is all tucked into this body of love and how startling it must be to feel that water break around you as you begin spiraling through a dark tight space, body morphing into a long narrow slippery form as contractions push you through into this outer world of human existence. All the lights, smells, and new energy that is outside of Mom’s body with Brother and Dad, swaddled onto baby blankets, a hat on your head. Air!
She and I shared an energy of sadness that our unity of body was ending and we would soon be two separate beings. Lately these last two years there’s so much of me that wishes I could have another chance to return to the safe watery shores of the womb, before life, before breath, carried around safe in the belly of love with no experience of what it was to be a human being living a life. I have wanted to just go back and start over with that first breath and the feeling of total hope and innocence.
I am just simply unable to take the adult journey through the mind and expend all of the energy of what it has been to live through this tremendous life to get there. I’m too experienced now. I’m too shaped by life’s askings of me. That level of innocence is not mine to have in this life again except through my children.
Today is February 4th. I have had many nights now of contractions that have come and gone and disappeared into mysterious symptoms. The night has been a time of working through the energy of my resistance to opening again to life after death. Alone I sit, feeling it all. My truest underactive self interfacing with the way time is moving my life forward. Birth leaves me no way to stay stuck, no way to turn away from my deepest work that must be done to become fully alive once again. As the sensations pulse through me, I am waking up to being a mother, to being a vulnerable human being again, to living with openness and faith in life. One contraction at a time, my body takes back its desire to trust this life, to believe I am worthy of good things, to smile into the heart of life once again. Anxiousness comes laced with full-blown moments of panic.
The question follows, Do I have to? I’m scared. I know now these little humans I make in my body are not mine and that they are living a life of their own. I know now that I cannot save them from death, from life’s hardships, from pain, from their private destinies. I scream inside as I feel the cruelty of this. That I make them in my body, love them more than anything in this earthy walk, and yet I cannot save them from this fate they have set before them. The star they are born under and the great mystery of life combined hold their destiny.
I was such a good mother before becoming a mother. I knew if I would just do it all "right" and believed that my kids would grow strong and tall and have promise in this life. If I fed them organic homemade food, they wouldn’t get a disease. If they wore soft organic clothes and I didn’t vaccinate them, the chemicals would never harm them. If I held their hand at every street crossing, took them to Waldorf school, returning them home daily to the wafting smell of Mom cooking in the kitchen, they would know the safety of daily life. If I nursed them until age three or four and slept with them in the family bed sandwiched between Mom and Dad after chamomile baths and oil rubs on their body, they would know security. I could go on and on about all the ways I would do what was right, believing that I had control over how my children lived and grew.
Now I know that yes, these amazing ways of raising kids, wholesome and energetically sound do indeed make a difference in their lives, but they do not ensure a damn thing. After seven years of solid homegrown life, my son died in my own driveway by a car I was driving and my older son witnessed the death of his little brother. Life, death, and everything in between have their own path, their own agenda, and their own fulfillment into destiny.
Now I hold space as this little girl is moments away from her destiny forming. My body must open to let her through knowing what I know now. I still have all the cloth diapers ready, soft organic blankets washed and sterilized, and organic foods pulsing into her through the placenta, but one thing is very different now. I am not able to birth her with the same joyful blind naivety that my boys came through with. I am startlingly aware of life’s fragility, of my fragility, of life’s mysterious unfoldings of the primal strength takes to mother, knowing that children are not ours to keep. I am awake. I am aware. I am present. The distant dream spell that took me through my first two births is not available to me any longer. I must open my whole being, cross the threshold of life on life’s terms and pull her into this world knowing I have very little control of that first breath and when her last may come.
