My Daughter’s Homebirthfeatured

Written to my daughter “Magdalena Rose of the Highest Divine Order” (her true full name)

An Immaculate Conception

Dancing with grief after losing several family members all at once in a firey plane crash, an explosion, including my own Godmother.  She always wanted a daughter, I was the closest she had to a daughter. She cared for me and wrote me letters, she checked in on me and sent me her best wishes and prayers always.  Somehow her spirit is intertwined into this story, and here we honor her as part of our matrilineal line, at times she was more Mother than Godmother to me, in the hardest times especially.  Mourning her sudden loss and dancing (literally dancing) through that greif was part of my process.  We listened to deep root vibrating African blues that winter, shaking and sounding out the love and the heartache.  We met in our eros to feel life moving through us, life which felt even more precious than before. 

You saw an opening, no matter how minuscule and you let yourself in, seeing the higher plan at play, the highest plan which is our family with You.

A Pregnancy in the Underworld

The depths to which your pregnancy led me, whewww girl DEEP.  I was surprised as ever when you decided to start growing in me, I felt not ready for you.  I thought I was still so ‘unhealed’ from your brother’s birth and in ways I was, but I was more ready than I believed I was – you knew this better than me.  We negotiated and you persisted, asking me to Trust you, to Trust in you.  I trusted…more than I’ve ever trusted in my life, I trusted you and what you knew I needed in my life – a daughter, my daughter, you – this incredible force beyond my comprehension of what Mother-Daughter could be.  I couldn’t believe I would have a daughter, that felt beyond me, too much work for me at the time to believe I was capable of – yet again you knew better than me.  So I said I thought you were a boy, I named you as my son just because I didn’t believe in myself so much at this time.  My confidence in being able to raise a daughter, to model for her ‘what it is to be a woman’ was non-existent.  I was still so young, such a mess, such a work in progress, I couldn’t have a little woman watching my every move, learning from every breath I take – that was way too much pressure to even imagine.

I had so much to work through during this pregnancy, remember my only experience with birth up to this point was my baby on my lap not breathing, taken from me and flown hours away…  I couldn’t focus on anything BUT what the moments would be like as soon as you were out of my body.  I would imagine you crying out loudly and a wave of relief crashing over me, finally.  There was a lot to figure out and at first I was terrified to meet Birth again.  By the second trimester I was so chill that I talking about freebirthing again “lightning won’t strike twice!”.  But by the third trimester I knew I would feel more safety for you and me if I had at least a wise woman there with me, and I never considering birthing anywhere but home.  I found 2 midwives who worked together, they could be there for me and they could respect my wishes for your birth: leave me alone unless I need or ask for assistance.  In my head I really just wanted someone to be in the house who could do newborn resuscitation and had all the tools the midwife who saved your brother did.  I knew deeply that this time around meeting Birth would be different and I believed in you, I believed you would be Perfect as you are, but the levels and waves of fear and anxiety I had to move through to get to the actual birth were more than I had predicted were there.  As I got closer and closer to your birth I really was in it, I was deep underwater, underground, fully in the underworld.  In the dark void and I really allowed myself to go there I didn’t fight it.  I didn’t meet with anyone or go to any social events especially the 2 weeks before you came, I stayed close to home, taking your brother on walks on our trail.  I called my midwife sobbing just days before you were born, so happy to have that support from a woman who could see how hard all this was for me, who cried with me in many prenatal appointments which really were psycho-spiritual in nature, yeah I peed in the cup and they checked my belly but really I was there to process and get everyone on the same page of where I am at.  They were astounded with my process and told me they never worked with a pregnant woman like me as I was so spiritually intertwined in the process and completely transparent about this no matter how ‘crazy’ this could have come off.  I knew you were perfect physically, I knew you were safe and good, I knew that deeply – the only difficult part of our pregnancy together was my fears from my previous experience. 

A lot of the fear and pain of that experience was hidden even from me in my pelvis, it was hidden in my cells which were expanding to welcome you. It was in the stretching of my ligaments and tissues that those painful memories and feelings of panic surfaced.  Your presence forced those memories out of me, forced me to look at them and FEEL them.

The alchemy that was your pregnancy is beyond what I would believe is possible in this reality.  Your perfection turning the hidden darkness to blinding light, regardless of if I could handle it…you knew better than me what I could handle.  And I’m not trying to put all this on you, but to me your whole existence is an invitation to be better for me and for you.  You SEE me and I want to be better: am I slouching? Am I caring for myself how I hope you’ll care for yourself? Am I in true integrity?  Am I modeling a high feminine expression, magic, effervescence, magnetism, etc? All these things I want for you, I don’t want my lack to manifest in you, I want to protect you from all the pain that still lives in our matrilineal line.

On a physical level I ate all the foods, drank all the drinks, took the supplements, did a lot of resting despite the demands of your 2 year old brother.  We prepared our home for you with a new family bed, many dressers for all the baby things and so many cloth diapers!

In those final 2 weeks as I was working myself through those final layers I would have false labor at night (it was always just a poop!) but each night I went through the emotions of if it was labor.  At first I was truly in terror at the thought of it being labor, I was panicked with heart racing.  Over the nights of false labor I was working myself to a more neutral point, night by night I was more and more prepared.  The night before you were born I sat at the dinner table and I told Papa “if I died I’m okay with it” he was like woah woah calm down, but I just told him to remarry and find a good mother for you two and that I believed he was capable.  This was part of my process, I had to be ready to die to be ready to face birth again because for me birth also meant the true possibility of death.

  I really felt ready for anything, I was ready to be stripped down to nothing at the lowest rung of the underworld…you were listening my Scorpion Muse, my Persephone, and you knew I was finally ready for your birth.

An Expansive Birth

I had this running ‘to do’ list that I was hoping to get done before you were born.  Most of the list was getting all the homebirth supplies together and random work stuff.  The last item on the list was to mail a care package to Robin & Tom, our mentor elders in Northern California.  It was a Tuesday, Papa was at work and I took brother with me to the post office.  I came home and put him to nap, walked into the kitchen ate a sandwich and then crossed off this last item on my to do list.  I went to lay down with brother but felt the need to go to toilet.  Sitting on the toilet it started to hit me, I could feel the shift in reality that is birth come over me.  I couldn’t believe I was going into labor at like 2pm, I never imagined giving birth during the day. 

The first contractions were alarming because I immediately realized that I had never fully felt contractions before – wrapping all around my belly.  With your brother I only felt it in my lower back, with you I felt it the whole way around. I was sort of shocked by this level of feeling, I was deeply in my body with every contraction feeling it FULLY.

I didn’t know what to do with myself exactly, I walked around the house and looked out the window but there was too much sensory input in the daylight. I returned to the toilet and texted Papa and the midwives.  As my body does, the contractions picked up quickly to 4 mins apart, I again had no ability to actually time them or understand clocks or numbers at all, so the midwife just stayed on the phone listening to me and determined she’d be arriving soon.  Papa on the other hand took what felt like forever (an hour) to get home, arriving just as brother was waking up and wondering why I was on my hands and knees on the floor rocking back and forth.  I stayed on the floor in the bedroom with the blinds closed in the dark for a while, the midwives arrived and I just stayed in there rocking on the floor against the side of the bed.  At some point I peed and saw the mucus plug come out I was waiting for that marker and was deeply in active labor when it finally happened.  I was attempting to shift the pretty painful (new to me) contractions to pleasure but there was nothing really pleasurable about these hours.  The midwives would come and watch me at the door for a few minutes and then leave.  Papa came to undress me and be with me but could feel I just wanted to be alone unseen in the dark (“alone unseen in the dark”).  More rocking on my hands and knees and then I started shaking through my legs and shivering lips.  I called the midwives to tell me that it was okay and they said ‘this is classic transition’ so I said time for the bath.  I crawled across the hall and into the tub Papa filled for me.  Once I was told by the midwives that I was in transition the pain was really amplified,  either because mentally I knew I was in transition or because I was in transition lol. 

I kept feeling this almost grinding on my spine, my sacrum – up and down.  I remember wondering if maybe my back was going to break and you’d just break out from between my vertebrae rather than through my vagina.

You were moving up and down at my lower back, I was so unstable in the bathtub – this shallow tub with no grip on the bottom, possibly the worst bathtub to give birth in. Papa was holding my body in place supporting me physically as I cried in my general distress and despair.  It was extremely intense, it was the trials of the whole pregnancy compressed into the physical.  I was loud, fully expressing vocally no holding back.  I had Papa holding my lower back giving counter-pressure to, from what I felt, keep my spine from breaking into a million pieces.  I don’t even really feel like I pushed you but I was ready for this grinding on my back to be done, up and down contraction slammed into contraction and it was just an onslaught of intensity with no breaks. 

I was longing for you to move down into my pelvis, I kept waiting for that moment when I could have a little reprieve from the pain in my back but it never came.  All of a sudden you shot right down past my sacrum, through my cervix and out into the water.  It was shocking! 

I didn’t see you come out, since I wasn’t really expecting you to come out so quickly.  I opened my eyes and brought you to my stomach out of the water.  I was holding my breath waiting for you to cry, you didn’t cry! I couldn’t compute and asked the midwives to check and reassure me.  They checked visually and said all is good.  You made sort of gurgling sounds and when you first opened your eyes you saw brother.  He came into the bathroom as soon as you were born and since you were facing outward when I was holding you to my stomach your first sight was his inquisitive face.  I asked again the midwife to check you to make sure since I was really expecting a loud bellowing cry and you still weren’t making noise and she said ‘she’s perfect’ and we quickly checked to see you were a girl – another shock!  This I truly had a hard time believing at that moment.  You started to make more noise and then a little cry, it was amazing to see your little face and how alert your eyes were all wet and covered in vernix.  Quickly the midwives helped guide our placenta out and into a bowl so that we could move to the bed.  We all hopped in bed and just marveled at you.  Time was moving so strangely I felt like we were there for only minutes when the midwives came into to say it had been an hour already of us just staring at you.  You were like this little alien stranger a little confused by where the hell you just popped up, your consciousness sort of trying to orient to where you were in the universe.  You were shocked by how fast it all happened too, missing that final station of birth. 

We kept your placenta attached for the whole night and ease-fully cut it in the morning and tied off your belly button with a cotton string.  The next days we spent calming down and just resting together, getting to understand one another, you did not like to be put down so we just held you.  We let the sunlight touch your silky rose petal skin and kept you unclothed for many days just like on the inside but outside, on top of me my precious baby girl.

I cannot wait to see what we do together as Mother & Daughter this special bond we have.  What will we teach each other as we grow together, you’ve already taught me so much!  You are 2.5 now and you are an actual Dream! A dream I couldn’t have even believed was possible, just by being Perfectly You, divinely orchestrated: every cell, every breath in your being, every gleam in your eye & bounce of your hair.

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My daughter’s arrival inspired the creation of this website, this project to collect the birth stories of this valley as many as the women here are willing to offer and contribute : read more about the vision and intentions of this website here

Since publishing this website we have been able to open up many conversations around the massive initiation that is Birth in a woman’s life across our circles of women here. We want to keep those conversations happening as we add new Mothers and new birth stories of all situations and circumstances from this place. The more diverse stories we can present to the community, the more we can see each other in the full spectrum of our woman at this difficult but epically expansive stage of our lives. Its really all about honoring each other for each of our descents into primordial wisdom & share the golden nuggets you brought back with you to inspire other women to reframe their birth experience or be the mirror that reminds her of her own Power!

Writing your birth story can be daunting (for both my children it took me years to know exactly how I wanted to frame it, for me and for them – often the lessons of birth don’t come through right away) but sitting down and integrating the experience even further by putting it to words and vulnerably sharing it with other women who frequent this website is all part of the medicine of Birth it can be a big missing piece that shifts a LOT. Even with the above story of my daughter I wrote it originally months ago when it came streaming out of me one day…I wrote it all and then let it sit in a google doc for a few months. Now I’ve spent these past few weeks finding the photos, tweaking the words and layout, remembering and recounting it verbally, sharing it with my husband, and mostly considering my daughter’s future point of view when she reads this one day. To share your story go here

My dream is to publish a Real Book with our stories. When I close my eyes I can feel and see it in my hands: a beautiful hardcover with luxurious heavyweight paper & gorgeous photos we can all have on our bookshelves and gift to our daughters a copy when they are pregnant, or read their birth stories to our sons at every birthday. I see this project as a collaborative venture that supports all of us who have shared our stories: a beautifully reciprocal, energetically clean experience we are all proud to be a part of and share with our circles!