Free Birth

Earlier this year, I gave birth to my third child, a son, at home without anyone present but my partner. At first in my pregnancy employing a midwife, I eventually ran away from her, her skewed ethics, and the micromanaged birth she was going to contain me in if I would have had her attend. I had had two other home births with midwives before free birth was a proper term (in 2010 and 2015), when it was called unassisted birth, and thought at that time I had had the pinnacle of experiences. This last pregnancy I began to unravel my state of mind from those other times, how much of my choices were not in my sovereign power, how I gave away my rights and my energy in so many ways so as not to face myself alone. This involved being in deep partnership with people I did not love enough, and so shallowly, and it involved not taking responsibility for deep junctures of my life that other people handling left me with less than I deserved. I won’t go into those stories too much here, as they are written elsewhere, but besides the fact that the midwives did little but watch me while I labored, they swooped in like carrion-eating birds to manage me afterwards to the point that I could not remember birthing my own placentas. A mammal, a human being, should remember this. I wanted, with this birth, with my only love child, to feel everything, to be completely conscious, and get as close to the tide between life and death as my son would be. And let me tell you, no deeper bond exists between parent and child as the one that comes out of consciousness of that place. A free birth also much deepens partnership between the man and woman; it seems to me the deepest and most fulfilling end point to the sex that began it. Meanwhile, I planned my birth full well knowing that baby might not live as not all babies survive birth. Some are not born alive. I wanted the right to bury my own child if need be, and not have anything primal and instinctual in this life taken away from me, managed by someone else, or put away from me because of its so called scariness by some official person. Facing that made preparing for a free birth easy; I was all in without any doubts. Clarity is as air to me in this life. I need to see and comprehend what happens to me in order to breathe deeply and well. It is I and I alone who will have to live and die in this body, and I will live and die in my body without anyone’s help, without anyone saving me, or fixing me. I do not go to doctors and I will not go and be diagnosed with anything either, not ever. Not after the way my mother went out of this life. I have made my peace with dying sooner if need be, than I would have, though I do not believe I will. The pace of my life and what I take into myself and meter out is in service my most deeply realized life, aka real health, and I have become an herbalist so as not to feel powerless if anything does come up. Though—real healing, almost all healing, I believe, is emotional-sacral; is all through the state of mind and the nervous system. But herbs are aides. I spit at what Google AI tells me when I ask questions or search for anything—go see your doctor—it’s all so incredibly colonialistic to me, this world of science and AI. It’s incredibly castrating and desensitizing, this take over of instinct, wildness, the power of myth, and the reality of magic. Without these things I do not live well and I don’t think I will live as long, ironically enough. I would live as if chained, fear out of proportion and ecstasy capped, the way doctors would have it. To have the mystic closeness to death taken from you by the same doctors who will anesthetize you with chemotherapy if you come to them sick, to the point that you do not know your own power which is wrapped like precious gem is wrapped in the dense rock of mortality. I would have ecstasy and madness with my birth, and I would taste my own mortality. I gave birth in the dark, late in the night, in the bathroom, while my partner was in the other room, only my son and I and some tenor of spirits surrounding us, all adrenaline and flashes between cold and heat, like the peasant women used to, standing up, so his cord snapped as he tumbled out of me. Then my partner came in, upon hearing me cry his name, and scooped him up, crying, the both of us showered in the blood of birth. I believe it must have been an old, natural practice to give birth standing up so that the force of the baby falling out might snap the cord and allow the mother to continue on to safety, to elsewhere, to bundle up the baby herself, I do not know, but I have a sense that this fact I never knew about, of what happens when a lone woman without help gives birth standing up, has worked into it something that others consider very scary but is actually something primally protective for them both, the natural and quick snapping of the cord. I would have rather laid down and gently, in the deep quiet of my own home, with the fire burning in the wood stove, burned the placenta cord with two beeswax candles as I had planned but my experience did not bring me that. My baby taught me that all could be well anyway. He was a good healthy color, already pumped full of rich blood, and healthily crying.

Birth of Jamey

I had my first contraction while I was lying in bed on the night of February 7th. I had bled a tiny bit a couple of hours earlier so I already had anticipated its coming. It was a soft but full clenching feeling, very soft and subtle. Sometime in the night I asked Lakota if he would make love with me, which he did, rather tersely, from behind. I was so big and round, my heart always in my throat, my lungs compressed. Outside the ground was covered in hard snow and icicles had formed underneath the wrap around railing. I don’t believe I really slept.

In the morning I told Lakota he should not go into work that day. We sent my—our—other two children off to school and drove up into the mountains. If this was the last day of pregnancy, I wanted some pictures; I had never taken proper pictures. Sometimes my soft but full feeling of being clenched by own womb, which had taken up the breadth of where my stomach once was, would happen frequently, only ten minutes apart, and then die off for an hour. I felt we had a little time, though not too much.

            “Probably this weekend,” I kept saying.

            Lakota, who had never been to, attended, witnessed, or seen birth did not really believe me. After all, it seems so impossible a thing.

We drove to Peekamoose, where I had once camped, and where I take us all every year to pick nettles in the spring. It is high up in the Catskill Mountain region but level as a walkway, with a black snaking river running through it that had gradually and calmly descended from a steep grade. Once an unlikely hurricane had tossed all the silt from the river over the soil, and the path became a mixture of soft sand. I had used to pick nettles along this river, river nettles that have fatter, more oblong leaves, though prickles up their stems just the same, where the river makes its incline, in between jagged rocks and tipping over mossy banks but everything now was deep under the snow, and ice had crouched itself over the river so that the water flowed blue as the sky and then was captured, and escaped again, black and thin through the ice, and racing through the diamond teeth of the ice. This is where I first took off my clothes on this sun shining below freezing day. At a lip beside the river of a cleft of snow. A place where up steep hills the beech trees and the maples and deeply white birches are placed well apart, where you can imagine, even see, how black bears can ramble through. I took off my clothes but draped over me my heavy floor-length coat, like a lion’s pelt. I am stoked by an inner fire that is my own season, my own storm. The water gently rushed by, gurgling up against the sharp ice, and in the glaring sun, my face flushed from the state of my body and the cold, Lakota took pictures of me, as I laughed at first, then attempted to relax my face and be serious. The sun gently resting on my closed eyes and wrapping arms around my own belly. My pregnant nipples were very brown. On the way back, following the little trail I had him stop again, I untied my winter boots all over again and stood naked with only that long pelt of a coat before a wall of thick icicles like the fossilized teeth of some dragon where the woods sloped up steep as a cliff. I lifted my chin and spread my arms and shot his camera some serious looks. Lakota flashed a bunch of photos. Then, hand in hand, we walked along the trail, back up the short steep grade where once I had seen bear tracks in the snow and that overlooked the widest most glittering part of the river. I knew I had to say goodbye for a while to this world I love roving in, to the mountains in their winter glory, soon, for after the birth I planned to be really confined, and stay inside my den for forty days.

I thought we would descend the same way we came but Lakota wanted to take me an opposite route which he told me led out of this region all the same. A direction I had never gone. We were heading toward Rhinebeck anyway to have a last meal out together, and I was a little indignant, never having been this way, but—soon I would be relying on him to take care of all those needs I usually handled only for myself. I had given birth twice before but never let a man do this for me. I kowtowed to his thought; I said, yes, show me your secret way. Letting go of my rigidness and giving into him felt so soothing and good. Nothing is so soothing as the disappearance of convictions. After a long, perhaps much longer, but very scenic route over narrow turns in the road where there were little bridges arching over frozen creeks to lonely houses, we came back closer to the towns and then eventually crossed the Rhinebeck Bridge over the Hudson, its shores smeared in snow. We stopped to eat at an Indian place off the Main street that was crowded on this day, in a little house, the two of us squeezing into a small table, me with my big belly, beginning to regularly but faintly contract. It wasn’t traditional Indian food but more eclectic and simple. I ate a lamb shank but I liked his better, a spicy stew, and ate most of his. We shared cinnamon ice-cream afterwards. I hadn’t wanted to but then he said, why shouldn’t we get this—isn’t cinnamon ice-cream your favorite? I laughed then.

            It’s true. It’s my favorite.

Later, the sun had set. I had bid goodbye to my daughter as it was going, on the windy train platform overlooking the Hudson River. I hugged my daughter tight and said hello to my ex husband. I think the baby will be born this weekend, I told him. She would be gone with him two days. My son was a different feeling. He would have come home with us, but, as we live in our yurt, in one room, we drove him off to his friend’s. As we were driving down the road in the dusk he whined from the back seat, “why does the baby have to come now?” I got out of the car before the finished basement of this friend who was in the warm lit interior playing a video-game but my son wouldn’t hug me. He went in the door without looking back. And I slowly got back in the car. We drove home, both Lakota and I feeling very sad.

We came home to a quiet house. It may have been about seven pm, in the winter, so it was quite dark. I turned on the lights, that always seem to me in this yurt like what would cast a glow in the hull of a ship. Our lights are a deep yellow, without any blue light in them, to promote good sleep. Lakota started a fire and there were the red and orange flames turning in the woodstove. It was another cold day, it would be a cold night, and wood was our only source of heat. I cooked farm sausages and pasta with an alfredo sauce I whipped together, and peppers, too, I think and onions, with salt and pepper. I drizzled olive oil on top and shaved parmesan cheese over our plates. Lakota had taken to lying on his adopted son’s bed, to the side of this round dome we all share—the reason he had to go, it being only one room, and I knew I would soon—be soon descending into labor, but he still did not really believe me, “because all my steam has gone,” he explained. I knew he didn’t feel good about the way our boy had left, and it was harder for him than for me to shake off bad feeling. “How could he leave like that,” he said, “I doubt we’re even having the baby tonight.” Stepping down the stairs of pessimism, where tight and tighter, condemnation closes like a clamp to close the throat tight in bitterness. I could release all this better than him and relax better with sad deep breaths and allowances I am able to bear now, without reacting or gnashing my teeth in any way, but I still felt almost rabid about my older son, and as soon as I had dinner cooked, I wrote in my diary how I hoped he would be okay, how I hoped he wasn’t too badly hurt or feeling abandoned, and that all would be all right. I knew it was selfish of me to even have a baby, living all in one room. But I had such hopes for us. I lived high on these hopes, even when there could be no guarantee or assurance we would ever leave this singular, dilapidated place, and no sensible prospects of money for me. Only what I could hinge on great dreams, and we can do wild and daring things in honor of the great dreams. It was too late anyway. I knew the baby was coming. I felt it would be this night or I wouldn’t have sent him away. I knew I would soon have other feelings to fill me with rather than any fear or worry over my eldest child. But Lakota had no such dissonance soon to come to him. He lay inundated with it.

            “Come, eat a little,” I told him, and he sauntered to the dinner table.

“Thank you for this meal,” he said, before our plates and our little central candle in a wax laden tin holder.

            Afterwards, looking across at his averted face, I asked, “how about we watch a movie? Something lighthearted to uplift our gloom.”

            He nodded.

            We tucked ourselves in bed and watched the Devil Wears Prada. Somehow that movie worked splendidly. It was from his favorite era, when he was a youth and a teen, the first decade of the 2000s, and besides being nostalgic of that time featured also New York City which I knew well and he had come to know through me, and it’s not worth mentioning any further details, but we both liked it and laughed and cuddled. My contractions had stopped. I didn’t really understand it. I remember soon after the credits rolled and I set the computer aside, Lakota said softly, goodnight, and was instantly asleep. I curled myself against him, on my side, let my arm rise and fall on his deep breathing belly and I tried to sleep.

            It was dark in the room. The fire dying. But I was rolling as if bunched, rolling downhill in myself, voluptuously turning softly down a little hill, and thrown up again on some soft grass. The waves had gradually then totally returned and there was now not as much downtime in between them, and at the end of them I was catching my breath. I lifted up to my hands. Lakota lay sleeping profoundly. I slipped from bed and relit the dinner candle, I built up the fire and spread out the old blankets I had collected. Some over the rough rug before the woodstove. Some at the foot of the children’s bed hard by the stove and some leading to and in the bathroom. I made my labor-aid drink with all the ingredients I had been saving: ginger pulp, apple cider vinegar, raw honey, sea salt, and water. Then I placed myself before the fire. I had my drink on a chair. I had my hands on my knees, or my thighs, between the two, up and down, and breathed. The fire leapt curling and slow in its iron box. The skylight up above, of this round dome, the yurt, reflected minutely the little flame of the beeswax candle.

            I had been so hot in my pregnancy but at times I would shiver as if having plunged into the sea, I got cold. I sipped my room temperature drink. With a soft blanket over my shoulders, I went over to Lakota and shook his shoulder gently.

            “It’s happening, Lakota. I’m in labor.”

            Still half asleep, he came over to the ‘couch’ or our son’s bed, our daughter’s being rolled underneath. He lay down and was asleep again. I stayed voluptuous by the fire. I sipped my drink. I breathed. I had no underwear on and was dripping blandly. Turning or gently bouncing on the big yoga ball did not feel good at all. I preferred the hard floor. I went to my hands and knees and breathed and arched my back there, then would sit back on my calves. Watch the fire. The fire seemed to consume the wood so quickly. In between I would toss another little log on, the flames very hot on my face when I opened the woodstove door. I was not moving much beyond a tiny circumference before the fire. I was sipping my drink. It made me a little nauseous and I thought of cold water. When I began to moan and accompany the rolls in my body with breath compressed into gasps, I came to Lakota’s side and began gripping his hips, and he woke up completely. He lifted up with his feet on the floor and watched me a little as I sometimes murmured, “oh,… oh my God… oh my God.” Quietly, he answered, “you got this.”

            I stripped off my dress and the contractions, the waves would pool down in me and spread down at my lowest contours as if they would shatter me. My breath built, suffused my body, and bottomed out of me in a groaning prayer. I almost screamed once, holding onto Lakota, but breathily stopped myself. “I do not want to scream.” I knew it would not help. It was past midnight at this point. I tried to have Lakota press on the back of my hips but no, I did not want him to touch me and crawled away, bending my tailbone down, bearing down, beginning to. I felt in myself. Nothing there but a wet cavern, deep, dark, and unfathomable. Close together they came and I needed now plain water which I had Lakota fetch for me. He came sometimes closer to the fire and sat on a chair. I grasped him around his hips.

            “Oh no, Oh no, Oh no,” I believe I was breathing. I tried to switch my language. “I can do this. Baby is coming. Just taking his time. I am doing this. I just need more time.”

            My body was tensing at the onset of a contraction and I think I had begun to be afraid of the intensity, and how it wracked my hips, and flashed my arms and chest with a sick cold, and then a black out, a moment afterwards, in which, afraid for it to start again, I was tensed with a shattered breath. The fire moved subtly in its cage. “It’s so hot in here,” I remember Lakota saying. Sometimes I looked up at the deep dark skylight and the tiny flame reflected there from the table. I gripped Lakota at his hips when he had moved back to the couch. I turned from him, spread my legs, and tried to push. But nothing came, and I panicked in gasping. Pushing undid me, exasperated me. Nothing came, and defeated, I crawled away, dry sobbing.

            “See if you can see anything,” I cried to him, but his vision is not so good, and he looked at my hips and my backside tensing, pushing, and I did not like being witnessed bearing down and I crawled always away, never mind.

            An anvil lowering and swinging at the bottom of my hips. My voice tethered to this heavy and inescapable pendulum. “Oh God, oh God!” All prayer and deep gasping breath.  

            I decided to try the shower. I went in there and stood and it felt easier and less discombobulating. I was regretting at this point having forgone a pool or a bathtub to labor in. In the shower I stamped my foot when the wave hit me and tensed up my neck, no, don’t do that, I told myself, and tried to relax my jaw by opening my mouth. I stamped my foot more times. The shower went cold, and I came shivering out, in a towel or a blanket, back to the fire, back to Lakota sitting like a regal king on his chair where I gripped his thighs and his love handles. He always had flesh to grab there, and I churned with my body and let my voice grit against this anvil slowly swinging within my hips, and on his bare foot came my waters after a faint pop. I had completely forgotten about the bag of waters needing to break.

            I put my fingers in myself then and I felt the squished firmness of the baby’s head and his little fingers up by his head.

            “He’s coming,” I breathed, “he will come now.” But somehow knowing that did not make me feel the relief it should have. I bore myself for more waves and writhed by the fire. I did not know where to go. I crawled away. I think I managed to put another log on, I had made it quite hot. I was pushing too, as I so dreaded the way the contraction slam-pummeled me like the hardest ocean wave. Pushing seemed to slow, to concentrate things, like catching a wave solidly rather than having it slam you into the gritty sand, tossed seashells, and salt in the throat. I had planned not to push at all because of having heard of a reflex which makes pushing unnecessary but push I did. I pushed when the contraction came and then sobbed a little. Afraid for the next one which immediately hit me, as a person can be knocked continuously down by the continuous waves. I lay I think on the blanket before the fire, a second, then up on all fours, rocking, and crawling, helplessly, nowhere. I tried to lay on my side and push but that was unbearable. I finally got up and dragged myself to the bathroom where it was dark. Lakota was busying himself in the other room, or the kitchen part of the main room, perhaps refilling my drink. In the bathroom, in the dark, I sat on the toilet and I pushed and then gasping I stood up and swirling with my body, in the dark, straining with my voice and then holding all my breath I pushed. I felt my yoni swell, I felt the burn they call the ring of fire, an impossibly huge swelling around the head, my opening stretched thin, thin, this huge head come swelling through me. I panted. I put my hands to the baby’s head and panted. I looked up at the little window or the little dim corner of the room, a little spider’s web there and our towels in the one little shelf. A small bathroom, a cramped place. Over the laundry bin I was standing, my legs parted, the baby’s head having bloomed through me. Then I turned, towards the door, a rug below me, and I pushed once more and his whole body slithered out. I have a vision of his face, his eyes open, of his falling away from me and his little arms reaching out, my little baby, and I cried “Lakota!” And he came running and immediately caught up the baby who had detached from me completely, his cord was snapped, and all of us were covered in blood, the baby, my womb and belly and breasts, and Lakota’s shirt and chest as he lifted up the baby, crying real tears.

            “His cord!” I gasped, “his cord snapped!” I was shocked.

            Lakota helped me back into the main room before the fire where our bloody, loosed baby who was crying lustily was put to my stomach. I looked at his limp torn cord, briefly, and then  tied it in a knot. I was taken again then by something I thought of at the time was cold and mad as the north wind, a gust which made my body thump and through which I moaned more awfully than ever I had during labor. I shook in this fit, my head slightly banging on the floor and my feet as Lakota helped me keep the baby on my chest. Then it died down. We looked at him. His cries had settled down. He was watching us with his little stormy eyes open. He was indeed a boy. He took right to my nipple and sucked. Lakota cleaned up everything, the towels he bagged up, he mopped up the blood. I lay there. I was in shock about his cord, overwhelmed that it was over, that I had made it through—for going to the hospital or to the neighbors for help had crossed my mind—and that baby was here, all right. He seemed completely fine, his color was good, not blue, but bright and human. He had a little dark hair matted with blood, and on his ears some blood. We noticed soft hair on the tops of his ears and at the end of his tailbone. I handed him to Lakota a second and lifted up and squatted over the bowl he had brought and gently pulled out my placenta with what cord was left. “No more contractions,” I breathed. Lakota helped me eventually and slowly make my way to the bed where I dripped blood the whole journey, dripping blood on my little rug and the little bed rail I had installed and I lay where I had already prepared absorbent towels to bleed on with baby on my chest. He brought me an Indian drink: warm milk mixed with honey and ghee. As I sipped this, we lay. It was about half past three in the morning. Then we all slept until the dawn of a bright new frosty day, and baby opened his stormy eyes. We were all up, gazing at each other.