Dear Birth,
I’ve been thinking about you.
2023 seems to be the Year of the Baby reflected around in my reality.
When I used to think of you, Birth, my mind would get so tangled.
I wouldn’t know which thoughts and perceptions of you were an infiltration of media, medicine, movies, and other people’s stories and which thoughts were filtered through my own curiosity on culture, identity, connection, ancestry, and the natural fears of being human.
This letter is an exploration of the infinite well that is the birth of life. It’s also an effort to step through the tangled web of noise that has sat like a buzzing ball of yarn in the back of my mind.
I hope you’ll receive this letter as an extension of my curious and observant nature with the best of intentions interwoven.
Actually, I know you will, because you already know me.
We’ve met before.
Origins
Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother.
This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother.
Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb, and she in turn was formed within the womb of her grandmother.
We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. . . . | Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm
In the south of Brazil, my grandmother Ieda was flown by helicopter from her small town to a neighboring city to assist in her pregnancy complicated by preeclampsia. After a grueling labor and Cesarean section, my mother was born on September 11, 1961.
My grandmother’s following, third, pregnancy was so complicated that she was advised not to birth any more children for fear she would die. All three of her births were cesarean, and her fourth and final child was adopted.
I was born in Fargo, North Dakota on January 23, 1992, in the middle of the night. The whole city was white. I was delivered by a kind Scandinavian doctor who even gifted me a nursery rhyme book, my full name embossed in gold leaf on the cover. I still have it to this day.
I was removed from my mother by vacuum extraction, a procedure accounting for only 3% of births today (as c-sections have risen drastically). It’s a procedure that can be injuring or fatal to an infant if gone wrong and may cause the mother to have a perineal tear, so an episiotomy is often also performed.
“But you didn’t want to come out!” my mother tells me, saying she was told that it was dangerous for her to go past 40 weeks of pregnancy. (My due date was in Capricorn season, but I was always destined to be an Aquarius, as you know.)
Nothing about my birth seems traumatic in the scope of a world full of, sadly, traumatic births. Despite being isolated from her family and culture, and very terrified of birth, my mother was ecstatic to have me and connected with me well in infancy, so I’m told.
As I grew older I was put off by the idea of birthing and motherhood, but remained curious — and still am — about the act and symbolism of birth itself.
꩜ IDENTITY
The magical physiological childbirths of social media. The movie scenes of screaming, sweaty women.
The Instagram posts of beautiful, blissful bath births. A bloody placenta floating in a bucket. A kiss from a helpful husband. Ample space, privacy, preparedness, resources, and gumption. It was the best day of her life.
A woman injured during a routine pelvic exam while in labor. She is strapped to a table, paralyzed from the waist down, a cloth covering her bottom half. A small cry wails out into the harsh, cold lighting. “She’s perfect,” they all smile wide and teary-eyed. She can’t move. The baby is floating around the room, changing hands. It was the worst day of her life.
Birth, I see all kinds of mothers on social media.
Mothering, a job and a title that has been held and honored since the dawn of time can sometimes feel performative in our online worlds. Through the magic of seeing birth stories, homemaking, and family excursions, there’s a sense of “on-ness” for the camera that starts to feel forced.
The village has moved itself to the chronically online — does it take a bunch of beautiful, fit, wealthy influencers and a community of hundreds of thousands to raise a kid after all?
Through the interconnectedness of online community and support, we see perfectly timed clips, images, reels, insights, tips, and tricks. Beautiful mothers with fit bodies just weeks or months after birth. Large homes and land with ample space for their families to grow. We love to be soothed by stories, shocked by trauma, comparing this and that, and mostly, we love to be entertained.
Dance for us, mothers — shows us you can do it all.
A while back I saw this quote floating around large social media accounts, “There are only two types of people in this world: mothers and their children.” While I comprehend the sentiment, it’s hard to look past the pervasive energy behind it. According to it, I am not a mother so therefore I am, always and forever, a child.
With this line of thinking, motherhood can feel like an elite all-women’s club where if you’re not a card-carrying member, your stock in society is exponentially decreased.
What went wrong with her?
Mother, woman, other, woman, mother, woman.
Birth, it’s a fact that Motherhood is not just an identity and a costume one wears in their time here, but a life-and-death job title that one can’t just wake up one day and quit. Until you leave this Earth, you are someone’s mom.
With all the magical and weighty profundity of such a role, I’ve deeply been enjoying shapeshifting my own identity — sometimes by the day — and tending to my own needs as I would a small child.
Many hours of the week, I stare out into the open sky or even at a wall in blissful silence. I regularly sleep 10 hours a night, as it’s needed to repair my own system at this stage.
I sometimes hug a stuffed animal my husband bought me last year when I was going through intense periods of somatic release. I would be overwhelmed by weeping and complete fright as my system released survival energy, so I would hug the stuffed pink puppy close. I’m here, I’m here, I whispered.
I reparent myself when I slam my finger in a door, half of the fingernail subsequently turning black and falling off in time. I wailed on the floor, hiccuping ragged breaths through screams. My husband thought someone had been shot. I was an infant at that moment, living out not only the very physical, current pain but also many pains past that I was not able to express at the time. I’m here, I’m here.
This is a sort of birth, isn’t it, Birth?
To be able to focus every bit of capacity I have on myself and my infinitely expanding nature is a profound privilege and a deep initiation into the unknown. An infinite spiral of healing. And you’ve shown me that when we heal ourselves, we also heal others, too.
Isn’t this the nature of the fractal? One piece of the whole that cannot be separated.
You’ve shown me, Birth, that whether we birth children or not, beginning to heal at the individual level is imperative in order to steward in the next generation and the collective in its beautiful, messy, wholly entirety. Beating to the rhythms of our own heart and blood.
⌇FOMO
What’s the most you’ve ever lost on a coin toss?
When I see photos of friends, family, and even strangers on the internet with their newborn babies, I feel so purely joyous for them.
What is more beautiful and ethereal than a mother clutching her newborn babe to her chest? The image is so stunning I could weep for all of them.
Birth, will I know the most true, unconditional, all-encompassing love they talk about?
At times I feel defeated. For a while, I was in tension with the notion that being a mother is the most true, unconditional, all-encompassing initiation, experience, and sacred work a woman could ever have in this body, on this Earth.
And, perhaps it truly is.
And… perhaps it’s okay to not be called or initiated into that experience this lifetime. I sit in the well of the mystery that perhaps it is not the only profound initiation or sacred work a woman could ever do with her life.
I’ve always hoped that women who can’t birth or choose not to could still live fulfilling, joy-filled, all-encompassing lives. Some say this is possible.
Some say that it’s not.
I remember crying one night to my spouse saying, “Can’t my life be enough? Can’t I just be enough?”
Why would you think your life isn’t enough? he asked.
I’d been under the impression that a woman’s life isn’t enough if she doesn’t create more life with the sheer fact that she (usually) just can. And if we don’t have a family to share our lives with, especially toward the end, “what’s it all for?”
It has been said that our ancestors dreamed us into existence.
I’m here because of all of the women on my matriarchal lines, sacrificing, tending, creating, raising, healing, and birthing.
Don’t I owe this to them and to the next generation of ancestors from my blood and bones?
And yet.
And yet.
𓆸 METAMORPHOSIS
What I've learned in this period of my life is that ‘la vie est une bonne mère.’
Life is a good mother. A good mother on condition that we remain in contact with her. If we seal ourselves off, then she can't help us.
But if we remain ready and receptive, then she stretches out her hand to help. She gives her children what they need, in their particular circumstances, in their own unique difficulties. | Noelle Oxenhandler, The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul
Sometimes I feel that I house the stories — the joys and the wounds — of others so deeply in my own cavern of a human. Perhaps it’s being a Projector and maybe it’s my own bloodlines revealing their secrets and stories to me.
Perhaps it’s the interconnectedness of all women together, woven into a blanket, one stitch looping the next. We are not separated, are we Birth?
The mother who has a joyous, blissful birth; the mother who has a traumatic, terrifying birth. Somehow, I feel them all in my bones. And I feel for them.
And somewhere in between it all, I desire to be the space for the women who feel removed from the lines of motherhood, but never separate from mothering or the deeper awareness of birth through life itself.
On the phone recently, a very dear friend told me about an indigenous elder she met a week before she (my friend) found out she was pregnant with her first child. The elder, a mother herself, said that mothering isn’t just about mothering children.
A woman can mother creative projects, ideas, plants, animals, other people, etc. She can bring forth creation; and life. And as one of my teachers always says, life feeds life.
It was so special to connect with my oldest and dearest friend this way — her sweet new babe at her chest while we spoke on the phone, her gentle suckles and coos audible, while we spoke about the intricacies and beauty of mothering, birthing, and being human.
Life feeds life.
There have been five women to enter the course of my life — personally, familially, virtually, and para-socially — who are not mothers. Four of them will never be mothers, either.
But their deep awareness, presence, and ability to meet life with life has been so paramount in my own journey.
Like elders before me, they set that path aglow and held my hand at different phases. Eventually, they must always leave me and I have to continue on on my own. But their ability to have mothered me, when they didn’t know me or maybe didn’t even intend to mother anyone, has left such an imprint on my heart.
On the contrary, I’ve experienced some mean-girl, clicky, and bullying women on the internet and in person to, coincidentally, all be mothers.
Of course, this is not meant to make any sweeping generalizations whatsoever — it’s simply a small observation that led me to ponder.
I’d sometimes wonder why extending a caring heart was reserved only for our brood. I’d contemplate why that same sort of kindness and awareness isn’t always extended to others we interact with.
Of course, survival and “thrival” needs should be given to our family first, as we rely on each other to have those needs met. But what I’m really talking about is simple, intrinsic humanity — a connectedness to all things. Small kindnesses and awareness.
Kylie Jenner was quoted around the world for recently stating her regret of having “work done” to her body and face for fear of how it will influence her young daughter, Stormi.
Kylie denied any and all claims of plastic surgery for the last decade — was she not conscientious of influencing millions of other women’s daughters by denying these claims, yet selling them the idea through her makeup and skincare brands that, of course, you can look like me?
It’s well known that the largest tech CEOs and billionaires don’t give their children internet access or smartphones until they are late teenagers, yet are more than happy to put addictive apps and screens in front of billions of other people’s toddlers and teens.
Birth, I feel that having one’s own children should not be the only way we care for children at large on our planet. And maybe loving children (people) shouldn’t only be reserved for one’s own inner circle.
Like puppies and kittens (versus the scraggly old cat with an attitude and a hemorrhoid), it sometimes seems easier to love our babies and kiddos than it is to love our neighbor pissing us off, that friend that’s hoping for a bit more of our attention as they walk through a hard time, or the homeless person locking eyes with us for the second time this week.
I wonder if we are also able to see the child in the faulty adult humans that they once were. Held at the breast of their mother, connecting to the beat of her heart. Can we remember?
Like birth, like initiations, like primal roles we’ve carried within us since the dawn of time, it’s simple — straightforward — and it’s not simple at all.
I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up.
I think what we do is mostly grow old.
We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias. | Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
In The Well of The Mystery
Birth, while I have no lived experience of pregnancy, birthing children, or being a mother, you have still shown me so much.
You have led me through such deep, guttural pains. Screams. You have shown me pure bliss, a connectedness to all that is. Wonder. You have rocked me through all-encompassing fear of I can’t do this anymore.
You’re so close, you tell me. Through extreme bodily changes, hormones, moods, loss, and renewed strength, you’ve shown me the process isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ebb, a flow, one that never really ends, similar to the role of motherhood.
And thank you for showing me that.
I honor all mothers. Mine, my grandmothers, and all the women on my matriarchal lines before me.
I honor all of the women who want to birth but cannot.
I honor all of the women who choose not to birth but remain in full connectedness to life.
I honor my beautiful friends and cousins who are new mothers. May you and your children be protected and guided, all the days of your life.
May we all.
Remembering Birth through life itself,
Tracy