Birth Stories

All birthing stories are hectic. Because they were quick, or slow, because they were emergencies, or perfect, or because the babies were big, or small, or born loud or silent. Because birth plans are like parenting plans, they don't exist the moment you realise that, as a parent the control ship has sailed and you are merely a passenger. And you're not actually on a ship, you're in a space rocket, and the manual you're holding is for a donkey wagon, and it's written in Taiwanese.

The stories are generally and hopefully great, after the fact. A good yarn to spin the night before your eight year old's birthday. 'Your birth was life changing and amazing... yes, I was induced, and there was meconium when they broke my waters, and your heart rate dropped and you were over 4kgs and you tore me open like a massive jagged mango and I didn't think I would ever sit again... but it was life changing and amazing.' 

But as mothers that day, those days, never leave us. They stay deep in our wombs. I imagine these wombs look like deep primal caves, the hands and feet of our babies imprinted on their walls, the first primitive memories of flesh and blood forming records for eternity in the echoing chambers of our bodies. 

And everything about it is deeply, deeply painful. There is the grief in releasing a child into the world, there is also relief, there is panic, there in uncertainty and there is unbelievable, blinding love. And it really really hurts. 

And at a moment in time when everything should be about you, it is not. When you should be held and fed and nursed and counselled and healed, you cannot. Because there is a part of you that is no longer a part of you who needs all of you. It is the craziest thing. 

Someone I love is currently trying to make sense of her birth story. She's trying to piece together 24 hours of what will one day be an incredible story but for now is a blur of peaks and troughs. And she's still very much in the thick of it.

I want her to know that the collective wombs of her mother, her sisters, her cousins, her aunts, her family heave with hers. They echo with the cries of their own babies. They whisper her deepest fear and pain and love. 

We write the story of motherhood. It is a story that has been written by us for thousands and thousands of years. We bare witness to each other and we carry that deep pain of childbirth with us in the depths of who we are. The hand prints of our babies will be immortalized forever on the walls of memory and part of our children will be in us forever.

And when we share our birth stories we know that deep inside us a familiar kick will jolt us, the memory of a small person will wriggle, because your story is our story, because that is what motherhood is.