Giving birth is a matter of life and death {Essay Sketch #1}
/// multitudinous mothering entity /// A mother who moves through the world and navigates spaces while attached to or in close, physical proximity of her children. Italicized words expanded on in the Glossary.
Giving birth is a matter of life and death {essay Sketch #1}
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
Two months before giving birth to my 5th baby, I stumbled across some heartbreaking news. A childhood friend of mine had passed away suddenly from complications from childbirth. It was her 4th child. She had died two years before and I was only just now learning of it after a seemingly random search of her name online. I can’t tell you why she crossed my mind that day, but she did. I haven’t been able to look up anyone else from my past since.
We weren’t close, me and the sweet mama who left this Earth before all her babies could know her name. We grew up together but after high school, we didn’t stay in touch. And after I left social media, I didn’t even see the occasional updates that give you the illusion that you are caught up on everyone’s lives, even if you don’t talk to them regularly, or at all. So I didn’t even know that she was having another baby, or that she only survived the first seven days of postpartum.
The news landed on my heart so heavy. I was shocked and saddened. I felt there was nothing I could do or say. I called my mother and told her, because she was the only other person I knew who knew me and my old friend as the little girls we used to be, and she would understand why this was so unbelievable and tragic. Later that day I cried at the counter while chopping garlic, and onions and bell peppers for spaghetti. I thought of her children. I thought of their grandmother, my first dance teacher, who had already died a few years before her eldest daughter. I thought of her children’s aunts, who must be overcome with even more unspeakable griefs. First their mother, and now their sister. And still, all the children who needed them.
For the next few weeks I couldn’t get my old friend off my mind. I kept wondering why did I have to know the truth. Until searching her name, she was wonderfully alive in my mind. She was well and here and whole. Why now? I kept asking no one. Why did I have to remember her when I did? And I also felt guilty for feeling these thoughts. I felt I had no real place to mourn her, this late and this loud. It’s been two years. The tragedy, after all, wasn’t in the knowing. It was in the inconceivable absence her loss created for her children, for her whole family. I decided that I was being selfish. I stuffed those intractable feelings away as best I could. Instead, I prayed vigilant prayers of gratitude that I had so far lived long enough for all my children to know my name. In the deep of the night when all the munchkins were sleeping, with my eyes closed, one hand to my heart, the other over my expanding belly, I prayed that I lived long enough for the new baby coming to know me too.
On one wall in my birthing altar, also known as my room that I share with my 3 youngest children, there is a collage of pictures of me at various stages of my becoming. From infant to girl to young woman to college student to dancing artist to mother. When I come across pictures in old journals and albums, I reflect on the moments and stories they hold, and then I sometimes add them to the wall.
One of these pictures is from a dance recital when I am about 9 years old, I’m guessing. There’s a train of girls dancing up the aisle of the church where our winter recitals were always held. We are in black leotards and our tights are all different colors. Each girl has a scarf tied around her waist that matches the color of her tights. Our arms are lifted in celebration as we sashay and bounce to the beat. I am smiling at my mother, probably, who is taking a picture of me as we dance up the aisle. Directly behind me in the procession of dancing girls is my old friend. I hadn’t realized. She’s been on my wall, in my birthing altar, all this time.
When my 5th baby is one week and one day old, I dream of my old friend. In the dream I am asking after her children, if they are well. Her eyes stare back at me but she doesn’t utter a word. In the words that aren’t said, I hear it all. Her rage, her despair, her grief, her longing, her love. All the things a mother might feel if her precious time with her babies was cut short by forces beyond her control. Uncomfortable as it is, I hold her gaze. I do not look away, or down at my feet, or at the palms of my hands that can do nothing to bring her back to her children. I do not shake myself awake and free myself from feeling this heartache, this massive grief that extends past the safety of the grave, adding evermore gravity to the breaths and the seconds of the living.
My baby stirs beside me, signaling she is waking. I rise up from where we’ve been cuddled together so that she could nurse on her side while I claimed a few minutes of sleep. I place her over the bucket to catch a pee. She fusses at the delay but I am excited to have saved another diaper. After she finishes I put her to the breast, and she latches quickly with great relief. As she nurses I remember the dream. It did not conveniently slip away from my consciousness, like the sun that is now falling down from the sky as the early evening hour approaches. Why do some dreams fade and some dreams stay?
There is something brewing here, some larger work that wants to be born. There is a reason I had to discover the story of my friend’s transition, and that her death was connected to her birthing journey. I have been sitting with how to honor her, and her children, in my own way. I’ve been holding the drafting of this story sketch until after the birth of my baby. There are some things too difficult to put down in writing when you are coming to the threshold of life and death yourself, making a way to birth a new being into the world.
Everyday I am aware of how alive I am, and how grateful I am that my children have me. There’s a deeper reason for this knowing about my friend and her children, and the way I was ushered into the knowing, and the way the knowing has embedded itself in my heart. I am still coming to understand the fullness and majesty of what it means, of what it is, that I get to live this life of mine. That I get to birth my children. That I get to be their mother.
