Birth Message

I don't know how to start this story other than to say it goes way back. I can almost see her face and the way she turns her skirt in the kitchen, belly extended, radiant and warm with fresh baked bread beside her. She doesn't know that labor will be so difficult, and that she dies shortly after of complications. Barely time to hold her newborn daughter, she is gone. My great-grandmother.

My great-grandfather could not manage alone, now with a newborn and a small daughter. He sent them to live with his parents. He drifted further into alcohol and never returned, except once a decade or so, to ask for money.

My grandmother grew with her sister, Beulah, an artistic soul, who was made to marry a farmer early on. He sent her away to a mental institution for her eccentric traits where she later died.

My grandmother married a handsome young man, who worked in a boiler room of a stove company. She had two daughters. Her husband made his way up to become president of the company. One night he was to be honored at a meeting in Chicago. She never attended such functions, but this time she would surprise him. She bought a new dress and hat, rode the train alone (in the 30s) to Chicago. As she waited in back, she watched him take the stage. He introduced another woman as his wife. My grandmother slipped behind the back curtain, stole away to the train station, and returned home. She never said a thing.

When my mother, after three children and three miscarriages, was pregnant with me at 39, my grandmother slugged my father upon hearing the news. She hated him for putting her daughter in danger - she was too old, had had too many surgeries, and could die in child birth!

My mother tried to calm her mother. Even when she began to feel abdominal pain at six months, she assured her mother that everything was fine. When she had to miss Christmas Eve dinner to be taken to the emergency room, everyone worried. For five days she waited and agonized. They had to go in and operate and risk my death. Her death or my death, the odds were getting closer with each day they waited. With very little anesthesia, they removed abdominal adhesions that wrapped around her colon. I went into distress and they had to take me. She was far away and I was not yet close enough, and we passed each other, in the beginning, like that. I was four pounds.

That's the front story.

The other day in therapy, I am asked if the issue I need to look at has to do with my childhood? No. With my birth? Yes. Does it begin before my birth? Yes. How far back? With closed eyes, deep in trance, I nod my head yes as she counts back three generations. It's so far back I can't see clearly. I piece together bits of information, but more than that, I let myself swim down in consciousness, through my own body, to find the answers.

"What is the message that was given to your grandmother at birth?" she asks. Tears pour down my cheeks as the image of my grandmother as an infant appears before me. What could she possibly know about existence, except that her very being killed her mother? And shame. Shame about being a woman, and about all things associated with giving birth. And then I imagine my mother in the first moments after being born, tiny baby, left with feelings that she could never understand - why the sadness? Why doesn't her mother embrace her with affection? Like an unfurling ball of yarn, I feel in my body how the seeds of my mother's anger were planted then and consistently watered.

Continuing, "If your grandmother had gotten what she needed from her mother, what message might she have imparted to your mother at her birth?" And then, "If your mother had gotten what she needed from her mother, what message might she have given to you at your birth?" I just sat, tears from all of them, tears for all of us.

This is where the back story begins, the inside story. The story that becomes a belief, handed down from mother to daughter in my line.

My sisters and I all had labors over 35 hours each, all difficult, a few traumatic. One baby died in utero at nine months and my sister carried it for almost a week before she labored. My labor with River was 38 hours, I dialated to almost 10 centimeters, then had a c-section at the final hour - not because River was in distress....but for a reason that was as clear as day and as subconscious as the rest of this family inheritance.

This is an incredible country to visit - and one of those places that, upon arrival, I ask myself - have I been here before? It's all so familiar, beautiful, why didn't I think to come here sooner?

Since I started asking these questions and connecting with my ancestors around the beliefs these women offered at birth, my relationship with my daughter has completely shifted. Not one power struggle. We lay in bed and sing songs and laugh and I feel how we are held in wider arms....and that we, too, hold the women who never had the opportunity to heal their beliefs about their lives and their bodies and their notions of womanhood.

And now the weight on my back is not so ominous. It's for all of us. So as I search through boxes for their photos, old black and whites, peeling at the edges, I suddenly see how they are looking at me, waiting for me to resurrect their freedom. Lighting a candle on the altar, I place all of us in a circle and feel comforted that together we forge the frontier.