Childbirth As I've Known It

Last night I dreamed that I was dancing. It was clunky dancing but it was dancing and within the dance there were fragments of the way I used to feel when I danced and also, I was able to do a little low-level rising and hovering over the floor which is my dream-way of flying. There was a woman in the room and she said, "You are a good dancer."
"Thank-you," I said.
"But why do you fall so much?"
"Because I have not danced in a long, long time."

The azaleas, as I said yesterday, are blooming nicely and a few bees are humming about them. The spirea have acquired a few tiny leaves and even fewer miniscule beginnings of what look like bridal bouquets which is where this plant gets its name. 

Bridal wreath spirea. 

My native Buck-Eye has leafed out and soon it will be giving me its own blossom. 

I did some weeding today in the yard. More crocosmia along with Florida betony. I will see betony roots when I close my eyes tonight. I have probably spent hundreds of hours of my life pulling this weed and I am not sure why. In the end, there will not be any less betony either in the world or in my yard and still, I pull it. 

Jessie told me today about a podcast called The Longest Shortest Time which is mostly about childbirth and parenting, I think. She said that when she had first started listening to it, there was an interview with Ina May Gaskin and the woman who does the podcast had some difficult questions for her. For any of you who may not know, Ina May is the woman who spearheaded the homebirth-with-midwives movement back in the seventies and who has gone on to study and teach midwifery all over the world and to deliver many, many babies. She was a huge influence in my life. When I was pregnant with Hank I read her book Spiritual Midwifery which was a beautiful book and a groundbreaking book in those times of the completely patriarchal system of hospital childbirth. Just as things were changing in women's rights and civil rights and so many were questioning not only authority but the very systems that the authority had, well, authority over, women were rebelling against being restrained during childbirth (yes, really), separation from their partners during labor and delivery, the use of drugs routinely, the always-given episiotomy, the enemas, the shaving, the inability to move around during labor and perhaps most of all, the separation of mother and child immediately after birth and for long, long periods of time afterwards. At least that's the one I had the most problems with thinking about. Why should I be in one room after I had delivered a child who had been literally a part of me for nine months while the baby was in another in a plastic box under bright lights? 

It seemed absolutely intrinsically and instinctively wrong. 

Reading Ina May's book gave me an entirely different perspective- that childbirth did not have to be that way. And there were pictures to prove it! And statistics! And she had laid out a basic guideline on how to manage childbirth and delivery and with that and three friends, I decided to have a home birth. 

I was a hippie. 

I was twenty-one years old.

I was brave. 

And I couldn't stand the OB who was doing my prenatal care. Of course I didn't tell him my plan to labor and birth at home. He would have kicked me out of his practice. Or had me arrested. Or something. 

And to make a long, long story short, I did labor at home for twenty-eight hours at which point I said, "I need to go to the hospital," and my husband took me and within an hour of being there I had given birth to Hank, been told that if I tried to touch my "sterile" body or my baby I'd be restrained, and yes, separated from my child. 

Sigh.

BUT, we left AMA after signing who knows how many documents and being lectured to sternly by both the head nursery nurse AND the OB and by that evening we were home and I was in bed with my baby, nursing him, and it was the most beautiful time of my life. 

However, back to Ina May- she had made childbirth sound like something that, if one was spiritual enough and prepared enough and not fearful enough, would not be very painful. Women back then had been sold the idea that childbirth was SO painful that no modern woman could endure it without drugs. This was the party line for sure. But Ina May had said to not interpret what was going on in the body as pain, but as "An interesting sensation that requires all of your attention."

Well. I had tried. For twenty-eight hours I had tried. But what I felt was pain. The kind of pain (and I've said this before) that you think, "Please dip me in boiling oil in order to distract me from this pain."

No. Seriously. 

And I was shocked and I was not prepared for that although I had taken a Lamaze class. Which did help. 

So I ended up feeling a bit betrayed by Ina May. And also I felt somewhat ashamed of myself for bailing and going to the hospital. All right, truth- not somewhat ashamed. VERY ashamed. And somehow lacking in spirituality. 

This was something that I struggled with for a long time. Of course I went on to have three more babies, all at home, all long and all painful labors but at least I knew what to expect. And I also got a nursing degree and went to work at a free-standing birth center assisting midwives. 

So. Back to the podcast. This woman had also read Ina May's books and she had wanted a natural birth. Unmedicated and with no interventions and she had ended up with an epidural and I don't know what all but it was a horrible situation including an episiotomy that had been so poorly stitched that it had to be redone days later. And she felt as if she had failed according to Ina May's standards and she, too struggled with that. So in her interview, she talked to Ina May about this and Ina May, because she is an evolved and sensible person, listened and responded so positively that the woman felt much better. Ina May also said that she needed to update her book Ina May's Guide To Childbirth to reflect changes and the feedback that she'd just gotten and that she would appreciate more feedback from listeners and by golly, she came back on the podcast recently, five years after her first interview, and her book has been rewritten and is now published. 

And I can't wait to read it. 

Yes. I am sixty-five years old and I am most certainly never having another baby but pregnancy,  childbirth and early parenting have been and always will be passions for me. It is due, at least in part, to the home birth movement that changes in the ways hospitals deliver babies have slowly occurred although many of those changes are mostly cosmetic and we still have a horribly high Caesarian rate, even to the point that OB's are trying to educate themselves on ways to reduce it. But babies are not separated from their mothers until after skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding have been accomplished if at all possible. And "rooming-in" is a real thing. 

I got caught up in a discussion on Facebook yesterday about these subjects. A woman flat-out stated that the US doesn't train their midwives properly which means that home birth is not safe. I know that this is not true. That many states allow for and provide education and licensing for midwives to practice in homes. That there are master degree programs in midwifery. That women DO have safe options and that studies show that a low-risk mother who chooses a planned home birth with a qualified midwife are as safe as hospital births. 

This woman refused to believe me and I finally realized that she just doesn't want to for whatever reason. 

I remember when I was a young mother, attending home births myself, going to the capital when lawmakers were debating the legalization of midwifery and home births. The very doctor who had done my prenatal care with Hank and who had ended up delivering my baby was one of the people who was fighting the bill. 

"What's next?" he thundered. "Are there going to be chicken sacrifices during these births?"

Haha. 

Eventually, the doctors lost a tiny bit of their hold on the birth industry and women and babies have been the better for that. Women can choose to have a home birth or a birth in a free-standing birth center or in a hospital with a midwife. Or, of course, with a doctor. The important thing is that we get to have a choice- a safe choice. We can make our decisions based not on fear or lack of options. We can educate ourselves and make our choices based on real facts and real studies with confidence. 

One of the women who was with me in my labor with Hank went on to get her Master's degree as a  nurse midwife and then eventually to teach it. She delivered May before she got that degree. She was born to be a midwife. The last time I saw her, she had decided not to teach anymore but to go back to attending women in labor and to deliver their babies. 

"I just felt like this is what I was supposed to be doing," she said. 

The woman who delivered my last two babies, whom I saw last weekend, also went on to nursing school but never got certified as a midwife. Still, I trusted her and her skills and her knowledge so much that I had no doubt she could safely deliver my babies. 

And she did. 

Well. That's what I've been thinking about today as I've pulled weeds and gone about my chores. I've long since quit being ashamed that I chose to go to the hospital when Hank was born. In fact, I look back at that time and think that I was incredibly strong and brave. And plenty spiritual. And I am so grateful that I've had the opportunity to learn what my body is capable of. But mostly, I'm grateful for the fact that after my babies have been born, I could hold them and feed them in my own bed with my husband right beside me, my other children there too. To know the incredible and unreplicable experience of giving birth in the way I did. It is certainly not the only way. But it is a great way. 

And my daughters have had this experience too. 

Thank you, Ina May. Here's the Ted Talk she did about reducing fear in childbirth in US culture if you're interested. 

Love...Ms. Moon

Birth Day

When Mr. Moon and I got together, we got busy. By the time we'd been married for one year, we had a one-month old and a business.
Well, I had the child. He had the business.
We both knew we wanted a baby and he knew he needed to start a business in order to support us. He did his part in the baby-making and I did...uh, nothing, in the business.
This was because
(a) I had a nine-year old, a seven-year-old, and a new-born, and
(b) My business sense was in direct inverse proportion to my ability for procreation.

We were both, Mr. Moon and I, thirty-one years old when Lily was born. I thought I was a pretty experienced baby-haver and mama.

And the universe laughed and laughed.

Lily was my fastest birth. Only about fourteen hours of labor. But the child weighed over ten pounds and she had her little hand up by her head which I knew because I could feel it down there, punching my bladder for the last few weeks. It took me a very long time to push her out and when her head finally emerged, her shoulders got stuck. This is a very, very serious problem and can lead to all sorts of problems, including death. But the midwife was fast-thinking and had me flip over to hands and knees (the Gaskin maneuver) and Lily was born. She needed resuscitation. She was blue, she was still.
It was scary.
Outside the day was as beautiful as a day in late September can be. A day like today, in fact. Crystal clear of sky and air and there were lavender roses by the bed and a cradle, hand-made by her papa lay in wait.
Here's what Hank remembers about that day:

The day you were born, May and I stayed home from school. Mom was in labor, and we played out back all day. We pretended to have a traveling cart, with a team of horses, and we kept ourselves entertained while Mama did her job. Dad had made a screened porch into a master bedroom, and that's where you made your appearance. We didn't know your name until Mama used it to conjure you. 

And that's exactly what I did. While our midwife was giving my baby oxygen, she said, "Talk to her. She needs to hear her parents."

And so, even though we had not settled on a name, I called to her. I said, "Lily Rose. Breathe. We love you." And we touched her and she took a breath and she wailed and she wailed and turned rosy pink and the room became clearer and joyful and we all laughed and I took her to my breast and there she was. Perfect and fat and pink and gorgeous and sturdy and strong and given a name. 

Lillian Rose Moon. 

And Hank and May were called in from the backyard to come and greet their new baby sister and I was delirious with joy and determined NEVER GO THROUGH LABOR AGAIN and her father was so happy that when I told him we were never having sex again, he accepted that, and his parents came to see her and they were so pleased and even my mother was there and she took Hank and May to Wendy's and brought us back hamburgers and they were the best hamburgers ever eaten on this planet in the history of all hamburger-eating. That night Lily slept in the bed with us, and it was a miracle every time Lily moved and breathed and nursed and her father and I barely slept, too incredibly stoned on the sheer wonder of her being there between us. I had never loved him so much. 

And today is a day like that one was. Cool and clear and I am thinking of that birth, thinking of that baby, all grown up and a mama times two herself.  I am thinking of the sheer wonder of it all again. The love that ignited the spark of life, the pain and work of labor, the glory of that day, the fear when she did not breathe, the joy when she did. 

Every time I've ever had a baby I felt with their births as if I had been reborn myself. If there is one thing on this earth I am proud of, it is that I know in my heart that I started my children off right, having them at home where the love that got them in there got them out and they were born in love and received in love and they have known love their entire lives and are able now to give and receive love knowing that it is their birthright. 

They were birthed right. 

Happy birthday, Lillian Rose Moon, daughter of my womb, mother of my grandchildren, friend of my heart, glory on this earth. 

It is a beautiful day. And it is Vergil's birthday too. Today is the anniversary of the day he was born and who knew that a little baby boy, born on a mountain in North Carolina in his own mama's bed would grow up and fall in love with my last baby (yes, I did have sex again) and make her so happy and I just sent his mother an e-mail thanking her for bringing him into the world and raising him so right. 

Well, I'm all teary again. 

I've had a walk. There is not one cloud in the sky. My only sorrow is that I had to take down the web of a Golden Orb weaver because it was right in the path of where we walk to get to the clothesline, the hen house. 

I waited until she was safely on that red bucket and I feel bad because I hated to undo her work but I really do not want to run into her when I go to shut the chickens up in the twilight. 

It seems cruel to be mean to a mama today but she can build another web.

I am thinking of all the women who are laboring right this second to bring their own babies into the world. I am sending them and their children love. I am astonished at the way this works, the miracle of it, every time. I would wish with all of my heart that every baby born, every day, is born into love.

What a beautiful day.

Happy Birth Day to us all, even as we are merely reborn into each new day, and especially to Lily and to Vergil.

Love...Mama

Oh Soul

Click HERE to go to the place with the explanation.

You have no idea how much of my heart and life have been influenced by this woman. So many women have been. So many women should be.

She has made and does make this world a better place. These film makers are helping to make that happen.


And a P.S.
The Stephen Gaskin I semi-quoted in the last post is Ina May's husband and he is shown briefly in the trailer in the clip above.
Sometimes I just feel like everything gets knit up and bound together in the end.

A Midwife Is Not A Jr. Doctor

I love Diana, the midwife. Love, love, love her. I love that she comes to Lily's house for everything. She brings her bag and pulls whatever she needs from it, like a blessed Mary Poppins and it all just feels so right. She is so calming. She has four children. She has delivered many babies and has a crazy-low transfer rate. When Lily was going to the Birth Cottage in her pregnancy with Owen before her blood pressure became an issue, Diana was working there and both Jason and Lily felt the most comfortable around her. She was reassuring and Lily's blood pressure was fine when she was the one taking it.
And now, right in time, she is on her own with what she calls her "little home birth practice." And very happy doing so. She said that she delivered four babies last weekend. That doesn't sound too "little" to me.
"Full moon dregs?" I asked her.
"Must have been," she said.

I mostly played with Owen so that Lily and Jason could sit and chat with Diana, go through Lily's history, concentrate. Focus. We played inside, we played outside. I was his personal slave. Okay. I am always his personal slave. But I was able to come in when Diana was looking for the baby's heartbeat. She found it, too, and tears sprang to my eyes, to hear that loud, strong, rhythmic proof of life. Second pregnancies are so different from first ones. It's always been so ironic with me that during the second pregnancy, when you really do need the most help because there is generally already a crazy toddler around, so much less help is offered. It's almost as if everything thinks, "Oh yeah. She knows what she's doing by now."
Which is true, but the body is as tired and the tasks are so much more.
And it is so good to be reminded that there really IS a baby in there which is every bit as magical and amazing and miraculous as it was the first time.
Which it is.
So. I heard my second grandchild's heartbeat today. Or, heartbeep, as we like to call it. Owen said it was "loud." He was a bit overwhelmed by the whole situation but by the time Diana left, he wanted to give her a hug.
"I'll be back soon to see you," Diana said.
"Bag," he said.
"Yes, I'll bring my bag."

I am just so overwhelmingly grateful that Lily may be able to experience what I was able to experience in giving birth. The comfort of getting the sort of personal care which can only happen when the midwife comes to your house. It sets the completely right tone to me- the midwife is an honored trusted guest in your home, not a semi-stranger in a white coat or scrubs to whom you are required to go see. No signing in, no "may we have your insurance card?" every damn time. No sitting on a paper-covered table with weird pictures on the wall while waiting that interminable wait for the care-giver to come in. There is a million times less anxiety which the body will thank you for by being able to give birth more easily. As Ina May points out, we don't like to poop in front of strangers in strange places. Why would we want to give birth in that situation?
No, it's not the same but there is no getting around the fact that there is no medication or drug in the entire western medical arsenal which can relax a birthing woman as much as being in her own home, surrounded by only the people she chooses to be there.
It gives the mother a sense of control which she cannot possibly have anywhere else. And it empowers her in a way that nothing else can. To know that she can trust her body to do what women's bodies have done for so long. That the midwife in her practice is proof of that fact. Yes, she has her bag but mostly what she has is faith in the mother and the process. And her hands. Her strong, midwife hands.

I feel so at peace with this situation and I think that Lily does too. And Jason, as well, and that is as important as anything- that support from the partner. I saw the way they worked together getting Owen born and I know it will be that way again. But hopefully, this time, in their own home, by their own time frame.

I heard my new grandchild's heartbeat today and of course, my heart leaped in response. This is the way of it. A new one coming.

And then we took Owen to lunch at the Mockingbird and saw our darling May-May and Owen cried out to her for the entire lunch, "May-May! May-May!" and every time she came to the table his eyes shown and he showed off for her and he loves her desperately as she loves him and two years ago, he wasn't even here and then he was and the world shoved over and made room and our hearts opened up and made room and now we get to do it all again.

Thank-you, Lily and Jason for bringing all this love into the world. And thank-you, New One Coming, for letting us hear your heartbeep. We are so looking forward to meeting you. You can't even imagine. But we are.
And thank-you, Diana, for walking the hard path of the midwife. It's one I thought I wanted to walk, but realized I did not have the strength for. But I tell you this- if there is one thing that I know, it's that if there are goddesses on this earth, they are the midwives.

Yes. I Am A Hippie.

Headline in the paper today:

Bear vs bicyclist incidents very rare
Panama City man recovering

Now THAT's reassuring. Right?

Then I found an article on the surge in the number of home births. Okay, that made me happy. But then I got to this line: "Robbie Davis-Floyd, a medical anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin and researcher on global trends in childbirth, obstetrics and midwifery, said 'at first, in the 1970's, it was largely a hippie, countercultural thing to give birth outside of the hospital. Over the years, as the formerly "lay" midwives have become far more sophisticated, so has their clientele.'"

Well that just pissed me off.

Hell, yes, I was one of those hippie, countercultural women who chose to give birth at home and help other women do the same but does that make me less sophisticated than women who choose to give birth at home today?
I wish Robbie Davis-Floyd could see the midwifery texts we countercultural hippies used to order from England at great expense because there were no midwives to speak of in the USA and if there were, they used the English textbooks too.
Also the records we kept, hidden away because giving birth at home with a lay midwife was against the law. Also the equipment we bought with our own money from blood pressure cuffs to fetoscopes to Dopplers as technology improved.

We didn't just decide to have our babies at home to "stick it to the man" or be cool or whatever. We took a good look at the way hospitals were delivering babies in those days and said, "No thanks."
Enemas and restraints were still common place. A doctor who would allow your husband (and forget any other "partner" or doula or mother or friend) into the delivery room with you was considered crazy-cool. A woman who wanted to give birth unmedicated was considered insane. Babies were routinely whisked away to the nursery directly after birth so that the "experts" there could observe them for hours before allowing the mother to hold her child and nurse her. Episiotomies were given to every woman who didn't get a C-Section. Laboring women were not allowed out of bed and the only sustenance she was allowed for doing the hardest work a human can do was ice chips. All women were shaved before delivery the better to sterilize an unsterilizable area.
It was ridiculous.
It was as ridiculous as other things we hippies believed in like, oh, you know, civil rights, women's rights, whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables (many that we grew ourselves), solar energy, foods with no preservatives or additives, breastfeeding, and the possibility of finding alternatives to war.

Yeah. We were nuts.

Freaks.

Now the damn government's own dietary pyramid has been replaced with something that looks a lot like the typical hippie diet in 1976.
Bite me.

And yet- I am completely and utterly delighted that "sophisticated" women of today are choosing home birth because although some things have changed for the better in today's "traditional hospital" births, such as rooming-in, allowing the mother time to nurse and bond with her baby, allowing family to be with the mother, and fewer episiotomies (who knew that with a little patience a woman's vagina could DO that?), many things have gotten worse. The C-section rate has gone up tremendously. The notion that a baby MUST be born within days of her EDC causing more and more labors to be artificially induced which of course creates the need for more C-sections. The use of more and more ultrasound technology to try and predict birth weight which never seems to be accurate in the least but which is offered as proof positive that THIS BABY NEEDS TO BE BORN NOW!
When Lily was pregnant, the ultrasound doctor told her two weeks before she delivered that Owen weighed over ten pounds. He wasn't quite that two weeks later when he was born. That child in Texas where the mother had gestational diabetes and they told her the baby would weigh a whopping twelve pounds? He turned out to weigh SIXTEEN!
This is a particular bitch of mine, especially since I myself gave birth to Lily who weighed over ten pounds AT HOME and believe me- I am no giant of a woman. She was a gorgeous, very healthy baby and yes, there was shoulder dystocia and yes, the midwife and I handled it and no, I didn't rip or tear and yes, everything "down there" is still fine.

This is not to say that I am not incredibly aware of the need for medical technology in some birth situations. Of course there is and thank GOD it's there but for about 96% of births, it's not and yet each and every woman is treated as if it were which causes more problems than it prevents or takes care of and then more technology is needed to deal with those problems and, well, you get my drift.

We adopt technology which is unproven as to positive outcome and turn it into gospel (such as constant fetal monitoring) which only adds to the cost of childbirth.

Okay. I could go on here for days and I won't. But it was a powerful anger at the way the medical community dealt with women and babies and childbirth in general in the 1970's that propelled us to educate ourselves and decide to have our children at home.
And if women today are feeling the same, god bless 'em and I wish them all the luck in the world. But I would hope that these "sophisticated" women do, in fact, educate themselves and don't just pick a midwife out of the phone book and leave everything to her because the entire concept of choice must depend on knowing why a choice is being made. If there is anything in this world which deserves more knowledge and thus, power, it is childbirth.
And that perhaps they remember, as they are even ABLE to find a midwife in a phone book, that until we countercultural types demanded choices in childbirth, the very term "midwife" had almost disappeared from our language and the possibility of finding one was infinitely small.

The mother of modern midwifery, Ina May Gaskin, was as countercultural as could be found in the world and it was from that countercultural place, that place of not believing that just because something was said to be the right way to do things, it truly was that women began to educate themselves and open their eyes to better possibilities, the choices, the half-truths, the lies.

Now if we could just do something about war.
And bras. Oh my god. Could we do something about bras? Please?

As to the bears- well. I hear that bears vs bicyclist incidents are VERY rare. So don't worry.

And that's my soapbox speech for today.
Gotta go eat my whole grains and berries now. Owen's coming.

Love...Ms. Moon

She's The One Who Looks Like Me. Only Prettier. And Filled With Light.

Today is Bob Dylan's sixty-seventh birthday but I'm not his mama and as such, I don't have a birth story to go along with with his special day but I am the mama of another child born on this day, thirty years ago. I believe I've written about the births of every one of my children except for my May's and today would be the day.
May was my second baby and I remember distinctly the moment I figured out I was pregnant with her. I was digging a ditch through the hard red clay on the property where her dad and brother and I were living, right here in Lloyd, about four miles down the road from where I live now. I was digging the ditch to lay a water line to run to my washing machine.
For some reason, it struck me as I dug that I was feeling a bit...pregnant.
I know that sounds vague, but I'd been pregnant enough already (besides being pregnant with Hank, I'd had a miscarriage before I got pregnant with May) to know the feeling and what it meant.
I don't think I stopped digging but just registered the feeling and went on with my digging. If indeed I was pregnant, the sooner we got that washing machine hooked up, the better.
We were living then in a 10 by 50 single-wide trailer and I was feeling proud of the fact that I had running water, which I had not had in the house we were living in before we moved the trailer onto our land. That house had been a lovely old thing and we paid the royal sum of seventy-five dollars a year to rent it (and that's not a misprint and I am not making it up) but like I said, it had no running water and it had no heat and it was hotter than an oven in summer and colder than an igloo in winter and the floors weren't level and you could see the outside from the inside inbetween the boards but I loved it anyway. We pumped water with a hand pump and hauled it in for cooking and drinking and we had an outhouse.
It was the outhouse that led to us moving to the trailer. One morning in the midst of a terrible hay fever attack I woke up and took my miserable self to the outhouse and while in there I got stung by a wasp at the exact same time I saw a snake at my feet. The resulting hysteria led to going trailer shopping that very day. Our plan had been to build a house on our property before we moved there but I could see that this house-building was going to take a while and frankly, I needed a bathroom.
By the time May was born, we were settled into the trailer quite nicely. It was small but I liked it as well as you could like a trailer. The bathroom was probably the biggest room in the house and that made me happy. Plus, we not only had running water, we had an air conditioner in the bedroom and if that wasn't living high on the hog, I don't know what is.
Two days before May was born I was in that bathroom in the early morning when my water broke. Yippie! I thought, the baby will be here soon! but as hard as I tried I could not get my contractions to start. I drank tea made of black cohosh which is about the nastiest-tasting substance on earth and took my nine-plus month pregnant self for a run down the dirt road but still no contractions.
By that afternoon I decided to give up the effort for awhile and laid down for a nap with instructions to my husband to watch Hank who was playing outside with his little Fisher Price farm. I had just gotten to the deep part of sleep when the man, in a state of great agitation, woke me to tell me that he couldn't find Hank.
That's a whole story in itself but he was finally found down the road, all the way across Highway 158 which is the same road I live on now, naked as a jaybird and accompanied by our two bull dogs. I promptly went into hysterics and carried him home, crying all the way, and that as much as anything probably got me really started in labor.
I labored all the next day with my midwife friends checking in on me and by dark, they came and settled in to stay the night. I am a slow, slow baby-haver.
My main midwife had another lady on "simmer" and she had to leave in the middle of the night to go deliver that baby and it was just as she was pulling up in her little VW Beetle at dawn that May started to make her appearance.
I can't say that her birth was easier than my first but the pushing-out part surely was. I don't think I pushed three times before her little body slid out and I was able to see who I'd been toting around inside for all those months. I'd honestly thought I was having a boy so it was with some surprise that I discovered she was a girl and I didn't have a name for her but I'd been thinking about "May" for some reason (uh? it WAS May) and my brave and hard-working midwife's name was Ellen so she was named May Ellen. We came to find out after we'd named her that her grandmother on her father's side was named May and her mother's name was Ellen, so there you go. Meant to be.
Now here's the funny thing: I had spent my entire pregnancy with May feeling huge amounts of guilt because I knew in my heart that there was no way I would ever be able to love any child the way I already loved Hank. Just wasn't possible. And so I thought she'd be born cheated and that thought gave me grave concern. But what I learned the second she was born was that the human heart (or at least the mother's human heart) is not limited in the amount of love it can hold and as soon as I saw her precious little face and held her in my arms, I realized that all of my worry had been completely for naught and that there was possibly no end to the amount of love I could have for my babies, even if I had fifty, which I was certainly sure I would never do. In fact, I was pretty sure I'd never have another baby at all, which is what I'd thought after the first one, too. And the third, but there again, that's another story.
So I fell in love with May on that just-dawning morning in May in a single-wide trailer in Jefferson County, that holy sort of mother love which is as close to heaven as I'll probably ever know. The midwives cleaned me up and changed my sheets and then they went off home to tend to their families and my friend Lynn brought Hank home because she'd taken him for me the day before because I'd known I couldn't concentrate on birthing this child with my first baby there to need my attention too. This was the very first time Hank and I had ever been separated for so long and I doubt I would have trusted anyone in the world to take him except for Lynn and I think Hank still remembers parts of that day and night, even though he wasn't yet two and they are good memories.
So there we were, reunited as a family, the four of us, and being only twenty-three, I felt pretty good for just having given birth and for having been up for about three days in a row. We loaded up the old '55 Buick Roadmaster and drove to town for a newborn check and no one at the doctor's office could believe I'd just had a baby.
Youth is great.
We drove home and I suppose we rested some that afternoon and I still remember what I cooked for dinner that night which was oven-barbequed chicken and potatoes from the garden. It was a delicious meal that we sat down together to eat, a father, a mother, a red-headed almost-two year old, and a brand, new baby at my breast.
A feast for the body and a feast for the soul and as with my first child, I felt reborn after the birth, almost as new and pure as she was. I was frankly amazed at how well everything had gone and even more astounded that I'd given birth to this beautiful child who looked so much like Hank when he'd been born that her father said, "Well, Mary, when we make a baby, I guess that's what it looks like," which cracked the midwives up. They still resemble each other which is odd because May looks enough like me to be my clone and Hank looks like his dad.
Genetics are crazy things.
Before I got pregnant with May I kept seeing a light out of the corner of my eye. It would come and then go and of course if that happened now I'd think I had a brain tumor but in those old hippie days, I just took it as a sign that a spirit was trying to "get in" and I still think that's true. May has always had an incredibly strong spirit and is as light-filled and purposeful as anyone you'll ever meet. At the age of sixteen she was hit by a car, walking to school and I still can't talk about that without crying. Frankly, it's a miracle she's alive but she is and she works on her feet and she walks all over Tallahassee and she, like the rest of my kids, is a dancer.
She's also a writer and one of these days, she'll start blogging too and then you'll see that what I'm saying is true.
She's strong and she's smart. This past year has been one of profound and positive change for her and I am standing in amazement, watching this process. As with all my children, she has been, since the moment of her birth, one of my best and most influential teachers and we probably spend at least an hour a day on the phone, discussing everything from books to meals, but mostly just making each other laugh. Besides looking like each other, we move alike, we sound alike and we think alike. We certainly share a sense of humor.
That girl has been a joy to me for thirty years now. She's tried me- don't get me wrong. When she was nineteen she announced that she was going to travel the country in her little truck all by herself and no matter how I tried to dissuade her, she just wouldn't stop making plans.
And she did it. She got in that little truck and drove off and left me crying. This was pre-cell phone days, too, and looking back, I don't know how I stopped myself from throwing my body under the wheels of the vehicle to stop her from leaving but she did fine. There are probably some things she never told me about her journey, but she's here, she's alive, and that light I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye shines now from her own eyes and every time I see them I feel the same joy I felt the day she was born.
Happy birthday, my darling.
Thank you for bringing that light to earth through me and sharing it.
You're a gorgeous, talented woman and it's a better world because you're in it.
And you taught me about the human heart and how much love it can hold which is a lesson that still, thirty years later, is as profound and true as it was the day you taught it to me, just by being born.
Tomorrow we'll all get together for shrimp salad and key lime pie and we'll celebrate you and the day you made your way here but it's today that I'm thinking about all of this, crying a little as I write it because I'm just so glad you're here.
And that I get to be your mama.
Amen.
Happy birthday.
Shine on.

First of May

It's the baby-child's nineteenth birthday today and also my mother's eighty-first. Add that many years together and you get a century of life.
Sort of amazing when you think about it.
We got together last night with the usual suspects- the tribe, the troops, and had a supper and a cake. It was a carrot cake that I'd made with at least a pound of carrots in it and an apple, too, all grated into the batter. Billy did not have a piece. I promised to try and figure out how to make him a bacon cake for his birthday and I will.
I can't help but think back on all my kids' birthdays to the original day of their births, each one locked away in my heart and my mind, the happiest days of my life without a doubt.
This time nineteen years ago on Jessie's birth day, I was probably throwing up. I always vomit in labor. A lot. My midwife, who had been with me for every one of my babies, came into the house as I was puking and said, "Yep, she's in labor."
And I had been, all night.
I am a slow baby-haver. Slow, slow, slow.
But that last birth was such a sweet one. The first of May- how could it not be?
I walked and walked and walked. Besides puking, I walk in labor. It's the only way I can handle the pain.
My husband and I took a walk outside, making our way slowly around the neighborhood, stopping for contractions. It was raining on and off, but warm. The magnolias were in bloom and he picked some for me from a tree down the road. We brought them home and put them in a vase by the bed and I like to think that one of Jessie's first just-born experiences was smelling those magnolias.
My girlfriends were there. My friend Anna from Norway, my Lynn, my Liz (not my Lis, whom I didn't really know then). They were all in the kitchen, cooking away, making a feast. Lynn decorated with paper banners. I couldn't have cared less, being busy in the otherworld of transitioning a life from there to here, which is a completely mind-and-body-occupying task. Also there were my brother, White, from Washington, my man, of course, my midwife, my other three children.
I finally pushed Jessie out about five-thirty in the afternoon. She was perfect in every way, right there from the beginning. No struggle to get this one going.
Another midwife friend showed up just after Jessie was born. She'd been at another birth and I think she cried because she'd missed mine. She dived to my face and kissed me.
My other two brothers showed up right after the birth to meet their new niece. They are my baby brothers, Chuck and Russell, and in so many ways, my own first babies because I was twelve when one was born, thirteen when the other came. They stand in my mind as the real joys of my childhood. Chuck and Russell and before that, learning to read.
When my brother Russell came in, he said he'd seen a huge rainbow on the way over.
Perfect icon for the child I'd just birthed, this baby I hadn't known I'd wanted.
She was a small thing for me- only seven and a half pounds and here she is today, almost six feet tall and she shimmers when she walks and she shimmies when she dances and she just finished her freshman year of college with all A's and she plays the mandolin and obviously, the fairy godmothers that showed up at her arrival were done for the day and just emptied their sacks of charms upon her, then flew off home for their suppers.
After the birth, everyone ate the feast that had been prepared, except for me because my stomach, after all that puking, surely wasn't up to it.
I woke up around two a.m., hungry as a beast, and I took Jessie into the kitchen with me because I couldn't leave my newborn in the bedroom, and the only thing left to eat was egg salad which I do not like. Every shred of the carrot cake had been consumed and that's probably why I made a carrot cake yesterday.
I hear that my mother was born on an elevator because her mother gave birth so fast. She's still strong and hearty and I think she had a good time last night, too. She and Jessie have shared nineteen birthdays together and I doubt I could ever have given her a better gift than a grandchild to share birthdays with. She and Jessie have a special bond.
I named Jessie after her grandfather, her daddy's daddy. His name was Jesse and he was named after his Aunt Jessie, so there you go.
Loops and circles and arcs of light and life.
Happy birthday, Jessie girl. Happy birthday, Mama.
I am so proud to be a link all of this, whatever it is.
I was born to one, gave birth to the other, it's been something, and so it continues to be.