I suppose it's time to create a new post, but I'm not in any particular space where I have anything to say that would be noteworthy.

While making a sandwich out of a bagel yesterday, however, I did have a flood of memory and the words started forming in my brain about how I might tell a very old story to make it interesting to myself.

I was in the bathtub one night, and it happened I was in heavy labor with my 3rd child. The sun was going down mid summer so it must have been around 9:00, and my midwives were waiting in the dining room downstairs. I was sitting on my feet in the water, with my eyes closed and my hands on my belly kind of leaning forward and my sister was rubbing my back with a warm wet cloth. They like to say that the sounds coming out of a woman's mouth while laboring is a birthing song, and I was surely singing it to beat the proverbial band. The groaning is such a natural way of making a calling, not only for the pain, it's a comfort. I've read of silent birthing and I can't imagine a more inhumane way for a woman to labor, to not be able to make the noises she so naturally makes... the asking and the cry to the child to come out....

And oh my god that child wanted to come out in the worst way, and I called to him loudly, but it take so much time to work ones way out of dark places. It is a good first lesson for the baby human ~ Tunneling and squeezing through the obscurity to the unknown, and the pain is tremendous. I've always felt that way about birthing pain ~ it is a great, big, huge thing. It is tremendous. But one is compelled to struggle and free oneself from a tight place after it becomes unsuitable and no longer accomodates one's growth.

The contractions came so fast I could hardly make it to my bed, but it was there I had prepared that day for my baby to arrive, and it was there I was determined to be when he came. I could barely make it, my legs wouldn't let me walk and my body was so ready to propel him out of me by this time that all I could to was wait through each deep squeeze of my womb to subside, and go slowly. When I got to where I wanted to be, the last steps I crawled there so I was on my hands and knees when I climbed onto my mattress, my body was moving back and forth with my big belly, his baby hammock, hanging below me. There we were in a rhythm all our own, me singing him forth, and him blindly wiggling his way to the light, me helping him to help me to help him. It's a private, personal thing ~ an intimacy like making love that, for me, belongs best in a bed that is at home.

I moaned deeply but all those around me were hushed and only my sounds and their movements of quiet preparation disturbed the once empty room. So as the noise ensued and the tension built and there was no where else to go or anything else to do, I turned my body wanting only to stand, begging for the pull of gravity to help me, but there was no tree to hang onto, or pole built for me in my birthing hut to grasp. But, at the right time I needed it, I felt two strong arms underneath my shoulders pulling me up. I looked behind me and the man who'd started all this ruckus in this same bed one night the autumn before, had lifted me and planted his back against the wall and his feet gripped the sheets to keep his balance and I fell into him, my back to his belly and he held me up while I bellowed, screamed and pushed. Baby was working too, I could feel him squirming deep within me, through my vagina, his head and shoulders working like a fish gripped in someone hands just trying to escape to be free, and my precious body and it's ancient intelligence, in its earthy knowing, laboring and spewing forth my evolution.

A few minutes later, just a little past midnight, it was almost over between the three of us, from this place where we had all started together those many months before, and my partner behind me departed, setting me free to lay down against my soft pillow. My baby was delivered from his confined space and finally at rest in my arms at my breast, sucking and content. His nakedness still warm from being in my body, he was still attached to me because his placenta hadn't worked its way out yet ~ so our hearts were still in synch, we beat together for the last time during those first few moments of the new day. Our heat still wrapped up in each other, almost done, and his eyes blinked at the subtle light from the lamp on my bedside table, and his sweet lips were so red and he smelled like fresh bread, a scent that I didn't wash from him for days.