02/12/2018
Sooooo beautiful!
with
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LABOR: this is the 3rd in a series of posts i am doing about my home birth. sometimes labor looks like pic 1. sometimes it looks like pic 2. it is not static.
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i’ve never ever EVER been one to tackle athletic or physical feats; ask literally anyone who knows me. but i wanted to have the full embodied experience when giving birth. to feel it all, if i could—to be with my baby and body in the opening, as we have done for eons. in pregnancy, i felt vesselized, almost invisible despite my bigness. in birth, i wanted to be fully present. i wanted to do the work.
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it was absolutely the hardest thing i have ever done.
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even after attending so many births as a doula, helping other women through similar paths, i was a little dumbstruck at the pure intensity, the sheer difficulty, of labor.
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it was trippy AF, like hallucinogenic: wavy and weird. i felt the water bag and the baby’s head inside me with my hand. i cried about my ancestors. i screamed, naked, in my kitchen. vomited and sweated and bled. affirmations played over and over. music and voices floated. i said everything that came into my head. i clung to my husband and pushed him away. i couldn’t speak. i roared. hands were on me, then off. i was infinite and fleeting. i absolutely thought i could not do it while at the same time, i knew at a cellular level that i could. i had no choice but to yield and then no choice but to fight. no choice but to make an act of will, as the midwife whapio says in her “holistic stages of labor,” to continue.
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i did.
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i could say so much more about my why and how in choosing a physiologic birth, the thrust and thrum of my labor, the twistiness, what felt right and what felt wrong. i’m also still processing—but i am grateful to have gone through in the way i wanted and amazed to be on this side, looking back.
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as always, this is not a judgment on anyone else’s intention or experience. birth is so often unpredictable and is always individual. please, no rude or mean comments. if this isn’t your thing, please unfollow or scroll. 📸
