I Am

I confided in a dear friend today that I had been hit by the realisation: "Oh my Goddess, I am a freebirther!"

Since that moment, I’ve had another even greater (more refined and accurate) realisation. The birth of my daughter has not taught me that I am a freebirther. Well, it has, but beneath that label and at the heart of the realisation is that freebirthing has shown me, simply, all-encompassingly—“I am".

The great "I am". The universal "I am". The wheel, the circle, the triple Goddess, the blood, the shit, the pain, the ecstasy, the sweetness, the glory. Freebirthing has thrown me, if only for one moment that I will hold forever in my conscious, subconscious and cellular memory (as will my daughter--and what a gift we both gave each other!). The universe, the everything, the nothing, all that is the life/death/ rebirth cycle, all the power that we as women harness and channel through us when birthing.

Freebirthing has flung me into the cosmos and then pulled me safely back, like an immense technicolour bungee cord! Yes! This! This is what birth is! This is what death is! This is what life, love, pain, nothingness and everything is! It matters so much! Nothing matters! This knowledge, this realisation, is boringly normal and incredibly wonderful! It is all beautiful and terrible and I am a whirling perfect part of it, as I always have been, as I always will be.

I am!

You cannot dance in that bright dark abyss and return unaltered. Since my daughter’s birth, my perspective (which I had already thought "radical" and which was certainly considered so by the majority of the society within which I live) has shifted immensely. To read accounts of traumatic, medicalised, brutal hospital births had always seared my eyes, but now I find my soul troubled even by what I see, hear, and feel of other birth, even some homebirths with midwives. My idea of what "intervention" is has expanded dramatically. The animalistic protectiveness and connection I feel towards my strong, birthing warrior sisters knows no bounds. I cannot abide seeing it violated and I see that violation occurring, that profaning of the most sacred, everywhere –- in hospitals, in homes, and even within the deepest recesses of those birthing women themselves. Why? My spirit cries out. NO! It roars back to itself, with love, with defiance, with knowledge, with wisdom, with strength, with weakness, with vulnerability, but with no fear and no confusion. You see, my body knows now. I know. I always did. My body always did, but now we know. I am. That knowing makes all the difference.

When you really see that death and life are one and the same, what is left to fear when you face them head on? And even fearing them, even fighting them--with scalpel, with chemicals, with needle--it doesn’t change them. We can’t defeat life/death/ rebirth.It dances gleefully in the face of our puny fleeting efforts to do so. The only way to triumph is to merge, to surrender and join in that dance and become part of that all-consuming force. It’s also the only way to dance with your baby, because it comes from the dizzying cosmos within your womb. Babies dwell in the wet warmth of it. They know it, and they are at ease with it. Unmarred by our stupidity, they are perfectly wise in their base physicality. They are born naked, wet, slippery, bloody, smelling of sweet amniotic fluid, perhaps smeared with shit and piss, their eyes still aquiline and dark with knowledge. It’s in the base bodily fluids and imperfections of their entry that true beauty and bliss lie. Little manifestations of the wheel.

And we seek to meddle with that, to prevent it, to alter it to something that is only one thing. One clean, cold, "controlled" (what a joke!) thing, glistening like the surgical steel we wield in the face of a power that dwarfs our arrogance.

As I’ve been fond of saying lately, it would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Dilation. A woman should. A woman shouldn’t. A baby should. A baby shouldn’t. Hours. Primip. Multip. None of these things sound right to me anymore. Filthy medicalised daggers thrust into the yielding fecund flesh of a birthing woman. They don’t sound logical to me because they’re unimportant. They’re merely small manifestations of a greater process that we cannot control and never will or should be able to. We can tinker with the minutiae but we miss the bigger picture. Our medical shamans run around like ants, gibbering their jargon in an attempt to appear to hold the power that flows in great waves through the birthing woman. They never can. They never have. They never will.

The practical, earthy, logical side of things is as much a part of this process as all the intuitive, instinctive, ethereal things I have spilled onto this screen. I’ll dwell on those at some later point. I just need to open up and let some of the immense power I’ve been a conduit for flow forth, relieve some of the ecstatic pressure it creates and paint the screen with its pretty colours. I’m equally excited about smearing the screen with more earthy tones in future, relating all this stuff to the reality we all have to exist in, exploring the practical, the analytical, the everyday.

But it will always be enough to me to return to "I am."