1 Week

Daniel Jarvis Childers
just minutes old

It's been a week (actually 1 week and 10 hours) and I have not finished writing our birth story. However, A dear friend who attended has gifted me with her perspective. The perspective of a woman about to give birth herself. The perspective of a doula, a woman who serves other women in birth. Read her entire blog post HERE.

"Just two mornings ago, I witnessed my incredibly graceful and deeply wise friend birth her fourth son into this world. She woke up with a powerful surge at 5:50 am. Her husband called me at 6:02 am and I could hear her moaning in the background. It was the moans of a woman in transition, the space between leaving this realm and getting grounded again to meet your baby. I left the house ten minutes later.

When I arrived, I stepped out of my flip-flops, padded down their newly laid bamboo floors and entered her hushed room. I stood there, along with six other people, peeking into the bathroom in which she was floating in her sunken tub, her husband steadying her head just-so in the water.

The morning light poured in through the large window behind her. Her face was angelic but hard at work. Breath low and deeply entrenched in the song of birth. Her eyes remained closed and so I squatted down silently and touched her husband’s shoulder. He smiled in acknowledgement. Her midwife, the dear one who attended Kaia’s birth, whispered “Your doula is here”.

I grabbed her SLR camera and began snapping away, holding down the flash so it would capture natural light photos. Her lips parted and she blew out her breath steadily in the short moments between surges.

“Water”, she commanded, still with eyes gripped closed. I saw her grimace as she sipped on the nearest beverage, some juice. And quickly a bendy straw appeared to her lips with ice water.

Soon, her leg began to search for something to push against and it found the faucet head. Her waters released into the tub.

“Good for you”, resounded her midwife.

“He’s coming…He’s coming”, her voice echoed across the tiles of the room.

“You are so powerful”, I commented quietly.

Her almost-three year old son, who was snoozing peacefully, toddled into the bathroom just in time. He was held by a dear friend and watched introspectively and peacefully as his mama groaned and gave way to his sibling’s arrival.

And she began to reach her hands down below and called her own tender-hearted Father into the bathroom and said he could catch the baby (something very different to most people, but utterly and completely RIGHT for them. Beautiful). Her husband was supporting her from behind and wasn’t able to reach to catch the baby anyways. Her Father started to don gloves and the midwife said “Oh, you don’t have to wear gloves”.

And I stood on the toilet cover, very carefully, and took photos of the surges and pushes that brought her son earthside. Her Father bent over and, voice wavering but gentle, said “The head is out. The cord is around his neck”.

And the midwife helped to easily untangle it. And – less than 45 minutes after I arrived - out slithered her son’s body, and into her arms where she gazed up at her husband with wide eyes and a grin that never stopped and began to laugh and weep at once.

The room remained mostly silent, honoring those first minutes where mother and father meet the life they’ve created together. And in those moments, we also honored the twin sons that she held for just a few minutes, over a year and a half ago, as they left her body way too early to live in this Realm.

In that space, that house, in the silence between her gasps and tears, they were present.

Softly she looked at her Father and announced her son’s name. Named after her Dad’s brother, who died tragically at a young age. The brother he had always mourned. A namesake, born moments ago, from his daughter’s womb, into his hands.

Silence in the room once again as he let tears well up.

Later, he told me “I was there in the room when her older son was born, and that was amazing and so special. But this one…wow, this one was so emotional for me. I barely held it together. I can’t explain it. It was…miraculous”.

————————–

“I’m up next”, I kept thinking.

And so I witnessed her birth on a multitude of levels. I wasn’t really there to doula. I was there to hold her space, to honor her grief and her healing, to capture her son’s birth in photos.

I was there to prepare myself for what is coming.

And the universe could not have provided a more powerful message for me than the one I received that morning.

It is mine, tucked away safely, to know and ponder. There is much more to it, which will be revealed as my own birth unfolds in breaths and cresting waves and grunts.

Thank you, Mystery.

It is time to Defy Gravity again."