The Double Feeling
“What a gift to have a group of women come together to hold space with intention. There is nothing quite like it.
(…)
Today was perhaps a dream come true, although I didn't realize this until my reflection right now. I just love doing both the birth story circle and the 'birth story listening' debrief. It's the right amount of challenge for me, rewarding me in the end for my courage to commit to it.”
I truly feel these words. Yet it also feels double, the ‘AND’ kind of double.
What I wish for every woman in birth, is a beautiful birth. What that means for me, is an uninterrupted, physiologically normal birth. A birth that takes one deep in the underworld of our psyche and back up. The setting is a dark, cave like, homey-feeling place, with wise space holders supporting the mother. I had this kind of birth for our second child, and I am not sure I’ll ever again experience that kind of EMPOWERMENT I felt afterwards for days.
AND, I also know, again from personal experience, that a traumatic birth also holds so much wisdom, and gifts. That there isn’t the right birth, but it’s always the birth I need.
Does that mean that I didn’t deserve the birth I wanted the first time around? That I needed to do work on myself to be worthy of that beautiful birth? I don’t think so, either. The truth is, whatever the reasons were, I just didn’t have that birth the first time around.
I think where I am coming from, is my original foundation I set up before children. Of learning about the teachings of Masters, including ‘either all is divine, or nothing is’ and trying that on for myself. Birth reinforced for me, again I am speaking from my own experience only here, that either all is divine or nothing is, and I resonate so much more with both births being divine, compared to neither one of them.
I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and I wouldn’t be on this particular journey, if either one of my son’s births were scratched out off my history book. They both had me dive deep in the underworld, for different reasons and at different lengths, and both of them spat my back up out of that dark place with wisdom to keep and gifts to share.
I am thinking of today, after the circle, how my friend and I took his boys and my youngest son to the fire hall for a wonderful pumpkin smash. My friend stayed down and made a slow-motion video of our youngest, dropping a pumpkin from 2 stories up (all roped in and on the right side of the fence). When watching the video, it was much to our amazement, that the pumpkin was rotating and still managed to land right side up, smiling its spooky grin at us right before the moment of smashing. Somehow that seems significant. We couldn't have planned for this perfect landing. I could focus on the poor smashed pumpkin, but instead - out of grace and not because I'm so mature - I saw the beauty of this split second instead.
The same goes for birth that didn't go as intended. Once we feel all there is to feel about this experience - the sadness, the rage, the grief, the frustration, the numbness and depression, and more - we can start to see all the moments of beauty that were also present. All the wisdom there is to find, regardless of the way it went. While I wish every woman the most beautiful birth imaginable, I also know in my heart that no matter the birth she had, she'll be blessed.
With this in my heart, I start every birth debrief.
