Reprocessing The Birth

Birth is a strange thing. It's an event that lasts for a finite period of time. Yet I feel like our birth sticks with me and bubbles up every now and then.

Our birth stays with me in the strangest ways. I've been practicing Vipassana meditation at a very amateur level on and off for the last year or so. It was probably the most useful thing in getting me through labor, but now when I start doing some of that same breathing as a meditation, I'm back in the middle of labor all over again.

M. and I spent last night going over our birth again.

I look at the birth of Finn as labor and birth. I'm damn proud of our labor. We worked hard. M. was truly my birth partner. It was good. I was the Coyote-esse.

The birth feels different.

When the decision to have a c-section was made, all the involvement and control we'd fought for flew out the window. My memory of our son being brought into this world is all about feeling like I couldn't breathe and my arms flapping uncontrolably and being progessively drugged to the point that I can't really remember breast feeding him for the first time. M. is still sad that she didn't get to cut the cord. I still struggle with saying "When Finn came out" instead of "When Finn was born."

I'm still sad.

Birthing a child is something that stays with you forever. Maybe it's meant to because not so long ago we didn't have medical interventions, doctors, monitors, and all that jazz. We had our mothers and their mothers and their mothers who carried their birth stories and passed them to us. Maybe that's why birth clings to us and sneaks into our psyche: it's how women teach women to birth.