Two years ago she came into my world. That was a moment in time that I will never forget, nor a time that I’d want to forget. It is a time that I will always look back and be grateful for my surrender and for my strength.
Birth is hard. Birth is a very difficult process for most of us….because it requires the most ultimate surrender. And some of us just can’t let go. We can’t allow ourselves to go into a space transcending time and place and be in the moment and in our body. In the moment when we need to surrender the most we are often holding on too tightly to something. Some idea, an emotion, a fear and then when a new sensation comes that we haven’t experienced there can be fear that builds up in us. We don’t know how to breathe through it, get through it, cry through it, scream through it….we’ve been so conditioned so much to tell ourselves that we can’t. We hear many negative birth messages in society all the time.
I think that these messages makes it hard for us as women to be completely free. When we are surrounded by a society that doesn’t have kind words for us especially when we are demanding to be heard, demanding our freedom of choice in birth, and creating sacred space. You don’t see messages on TV that support women creating sacred space in birth. You see messages that remind us how hard it is and how we can’t do it without the help of modern technology.
So we have to surround ourselves with beautiful sisters. We need to surround ourselves with sisters who support us and help us to create confidence and love. So we read the stories of our sisters, the stories who went through exactly what we are going through. Birth.
We need to hear stories of our sisters, our mothers, our grandmothers, our elders, all the women who have birthed before us. We are all woven together as part of the same fiber. We all have the same memories and the same energetic connections and forces that hold us together. Some of us aren’t in touch with those senses anymore, though we are all born with that innate sense of our ancestors and then sometimes society depletes them, unless those senses nurtured lovingly.
I’m grateful for the criticisms that I received around my birth choices because they helped me become stronger. They helped me to find more courage and they helped me to remember my freedom. I get to choose, when and where and how I give birth to my children. It’s my choice to educate myself and I make all of the choices concerning my health and no one else can do that for me. Every time anyone suggested that I consider the birth center or told me that a homebirth would never work because nothing ever goes as planned, or the times people gave me advice for how to handle a C-section that would be inevitable because everyone gets C-sections these days.
I would empathize with everyone’s comment with a big smile in my heart and the deepest knowing that I have freedom. I am free to make my own choices and I am choosing not to have fear. I am choosing not to bring my child into the world through the lens of fear. This choice was liberating but letting go of fear in practice….much more difficult. It took daily reminders to keep myself from giving into my fears. Those same daily reminders helped to keep me from blindly fearing the unknown and helped me to realize that I was created to give birth to my child. It is an innate knowing deep within my soul, deep within my bones. I just wouldn’t experience it’s great power until the moment she was born.
I had a very difficult pregnancy both emotionally and physically. I learned a lot about ancestral movement and started to change the way I did everything to keep my body healthy. I stopped wearing any heels, I stopped sitting in chairs or in sofas, I sat on the floor, I started squatting several times a day, and on top of doing yoga I walked a lot! I definitely think I could have walked more and moved more but all and all I am very grateful for giving up furniture and all of the squatting that I did.
Birth is setting the stage for life. It is very important and while it is only a moment in time it has huge impacts on both mama and baby. I knew exactly what I wanted and how to be safe, I knew how I wanted to create a sacred and special space.
I’ve also learned to be authentic and not take what others think personally. I learned during my pregnancy to be careful of where I place my energy. And I became much more aware of those who take my energy and those who give me energy. I was very cautious about what I would read about pregnancy and birth. I quickly learned to see through the majority of BS birth information out there, whose only interest is to promote fear. I stayed the hell away from those articles and found a very sacred tribe who I could trust.
I had the birth planed so well. I learned so much about the physiology of birth. I learned about hormones. I watched birth video after birth video., censoring them to avoid the videos that showed a woman being violated. Which was really difficult as most of them show a violation and interference of some kind. Seeing the good as well as the bad helped me to shape my idea of what I did not want.
I planed this birth extensively. But yet in a lot of ways things didn’t go as planned. We didn’t find the house we would live in until less than a month before Maya was born. I didn’t have the birth pool that I ordered because it came late and Maya came early (this is the most serendipitous thing of all because by not giving birth in the pool I birthed her exactly in the way that I dreamt that I would years ago) I also didn’t have time to set up a camera for the birth because it all happened so fast and when I was in labor I didn’t care about anything except going inside myself and getting through.
In labor there was no intellectual thought. It was all feeling and all intuition. I connected deeply to my own inner wise woman. I was very prepared to get through a longHad my birth gone exactly as planned I would not have learned the lessons that I learned. It would have not been as serendipitous.
Instead of wishing things had been different I am really thankful I didn’t rent the pool from the local midwife, I am also really grateful that we waited to find the perfect house, and I’m grateful that the birth pool did not come in time and I gave birth in the small ceramic bathtub in our home, as I dreamt I would 5 years ago. I dreamt I would give birth alone to a beautiful and healthy baby by myself in a ceramic tub in a large Victorian house with beautiful tile and trim work. My dream played out in reality 5 years later in an unplanned serendipitous way.
The space that I gave birth to Maya in was beautiful and perfect. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I would give birth in the bathroom. I had this set idea in my head that it would be upstairs in the birth pool and that would be the only way.
Had that happened I would not have experienced the joy and the beauty of that space like I did. I am so grateful for all of this. That space in the bathroom showed me that I could find beauty and perfection and love in any space. That I could have a SACRED experience in a space that I hadn’t planned for.
I felt everyone in that bathroom with me. I felt my mother, my grandmothers, my great grandmothers; I felt all of the women who have birthed before me. I had protection from the ancient cherry tree outside of the bathroom window, it’s branches hovering over the window as if arms were wrapping around me to hold and support me. I could feel Gaia, mother earth protecting me in that tub. The sun held that space for me shining through the window onto my naked skin. I could feel the water holding me gently and stroking my skin… nurturing me. I felt all of the spirits of those who have passed in my life in that room.
I’m not a very religious person but I met god that morning, I met the creator, I met source. She was with me and gave me the sense that I knew I was ok. I had no technical information to process as my partner held such a great space with me that I didn’t need to know anything. I had no idea what time it was, I felt that I transcended time and space and my only purpose in those moments was to surrender.
I could feel her every single movement. I am so grateful for the discomfort and the intensity and feeling every single part of her moving through me. I didn’t know how incredible it would feel to have this sensation. I had no judgments of anything during my labor. No worries of whether I peed or pooped or screamed or threw up in front of my partner. I surrendered. I let go and said, whatever will be will be.
I was a primal animal goddess. She came through me and I roared into the morning.
Instinctively I knew that everything was going to be ok. It took over an hour for her to move through and come into the world. Some would say that this is “too long”. But again, instinctively I knew that she needed this. Nothing felt wrong to me. She was born with the cord around her neck, a nuchal cord. Another story I have heard many times. I’ve heard stories of women rushing to surgery because of the cord. When the reality is that the cord is rarely an issue. As it was in her case. When we lifted her from the water I held in her my arms and was shaking so much. Shaking from the power of this experience. Shaking from the oxytocin surging moving through my body. I couldn’t move the cord. Ash moved it. We took a minute to welcome her. My heart expanded and filled with love and joy that I have never felt in my whole life.
That bathroom held such a special space for me and that’s the kind of space that I want her to know. I want her to know what it’s like to hold space for another, to have space held for her. I want her to feel that kind of love that I felt that morning in my bathroom. This space is so sacred to me and no one else can feel that. Those moments were for me, they were for Ash, and for our new baby. This space for me embodies the sacred. In our lives we create sacred space intentionally with altars and by smudging to release negative energy. I am grateful to be connected to holding space this way and grateful to share that connection with Maya.
I am grateful for knowing the plants, for knowing mama earth’s beauty and her medicine. I am grateful for the ancestral knowledge of medicine making with herbs and plant medicine and for my love of making my own medicine for myself and my family.
I am grateful for homeopathic medicine and my connection with it.
I am grateful for my path of questioning systems and finding my own way.
I am grateful to have had awful experiences with allopathic doctors and in hospitals, for this has shaped my need for sacred space and has shown me how this system fails to nurture and provide sacred space to anyone.
I am grateful for the questioning and the learning I have done that led me to this place where I am able to question the medical system in regards to birth. To ask why most of us follow these made up rules blindly that the medical system has in place when they do much more harm than good.
I am so grateful for my ancestral knowledge about food and movement.
I am grateful for my sisters all over the world who have supported me and loved me. Those sisters who told me I can do anything with my feminine power. My sisters from indie-birth who answered my questions and shared their stories, I have much love and gratitude for you. I have a deeper connection to sisterhood than I ever have. I understand now our tribal relationship. I understand now how we truly need each other and that it truly takes a village.
I am grateful for my connection to my ancestors. While modern society is telling us that we don’t have to listen to our intuition my heart hears my past. My heart knows that modern society’s way of birthing and raising children goes against history and biology.
I am grateful for all of the women who have birthed before me. For my mother, my grandmothers, my great grandmothers and their mothers.
I am grateful for the silence I had after Maya was born. If you sit alone in complete silence after you birth your baby without any other outside influence you will know exactly what to do. You will know the innate sense from within and the best way to listen is in silence. It’s about listening and stillness. Whenever I need answers I find my stillness with Maya. When I feel fear I go quiet and listen to myself and my child.
I am grateful for my knowledge. I am grateful to pass this on to my daughter and to other women. This is the true work of us wise women. Passing along our primal ancestral goddess knowledge to our sisters. Empowering each other. Holding each other in the light.
I want for myself and for everyone to get back to our roots. I wish for everyone to live more simply and with more joy and less fear and less stress. With more love, and more compassion for each other, and more nature and more time barefoot and more spinach in our diets and less cereal. More time picking dandelions of course.
I am so grateful that Maya’s birth has changed me in so many ways. Surrender is the best learning tool. Only in discomfort can we truly change and know ourselves.
This space, this bathroom may be temporary. But I will always remember this space and the space it held for me that morning two years ago. I will always be forever grateful for every spirit who was with me that morning when I brought a new generation into the world. I can’t imagine not helping to serve other women so that they can do the same.
I was roaring
Thunderous moan into the morn
I was roaring
Surrendering as you were born
Love, Sarah