By Loveday Why
Mother’s Day arises a couple of days before my daughter’s birthday and so for two reasons I start to feel all tender and billowy. Sol too seems, on a deep bodily level, to remember the birthing days. Just as we did this time last year, we reach towards each other more, need to be physically entwined, in each other’s sightline. As we look into each other’s eyes – hers still changing, once midnight blue, then stormy ocean, now tinged with dark orange firelight – the shades and cadences of the birth journey flood through us. And wordlessly we know that each of us remembers.
Sol was the greatest surprise I’ve ever had. As someone who runs a weaving life path, generally making decisions according to whether it would make a funny story, of course motherhood would happen this way for me.
And then she was nearly ready, then suddenly she wasn’t and the long labour started. I’ve written a little about Sol’s birth before at Tribe de Mama, but I haven’t before shared the most exquisite part of labour, as it rises in me now. Alone in the early hours in the birthing pool by the fire. Fairy lights strung through the indoor trees and my husband sleeping down the hall. Communing with Sol and with the light that poured through me. With each contraction immersing myself in the wave of pain and devotion. Feeling the most at peace and empowered I have ever felt, in silent conversation with my unborn child.
Later (much later and now in the hospital) still with our lights dim and our people soft, I reached down and she grasped my finger tightly with her hand. My husband, terrified, amazed, quietly opening, held her body as it slid over his palms and then she was with us. Completely herself from the first second. Sol, the brightest light in our personal skies.
…it’s not just a day about biological mothers. It’s about those who mother those they haven’t birthed, those who have lost children, egg donors, surrogates, those progressing through fertility treatments, and all supporters and champions of children.
