With Woman

 A few weeks ago I had the honor of being the labor support doula at an amazing birth. When I met the couple Cinelle and Stephen back in September we had an immediate connection. They had also recently moved to the Charleston area, Cinelle is also an artist and spent many years in New York City. Even though I had taken a break from my doula work so that I could be present with my family during our move and transition to Charleston, I really felt led to be their doula. 

I was with them for the hard work of 29 hours of her 2.5 day labor. Every birth that I have attended teaches me about the human capacity to endure, to overcome, to triumph and to rejoice, and in this birth especially I felt those lessons deeply. I really feel so blessed to have been a part of their birth, and their little girl Anouk is precious as you can see,

here she is at our post-partum visit, less than a week old.

Amazingly, even as a new first time mom, Cinelle found time to make a video called With Woman, about her birth experience which you can watch here, I come in about half way through.

Do you see the little rainbow in the middle of the sky here?

As I was driving to their home to meet them as Cinelle labored, this little rainbow followed me on the whole half hour drive, I felt like it was a sign of grace and good things to come.

Vigil: continuity and connectedness

Vigil

Throughout my life I have looked for the continuity of those happy accidents that serve to remind us that each of us really are all deeply connected in a real, tangible, way.

When I was 9 my family moved from Philadelphia to Buenos Aires, leaving all of my friends at that age was hard, as was jumping into a completely foreign place, language and culture, it was something that I struggled to make sense of. However, even there I discovered those marks of continuity. At my international school I met a girl in my class who's father's sister was the college roommate of my parent's best friends. Seems like a remote connection, but those friends of my parents had a daughter who had been my best friend since we were 4, and the girl that I met in my class had played with my best friend on multiple occasions. Finding this out really blew my little mind, and was a source of comfort to me for while, knowing that even so far away there was someone who had played with my old friend made me feel more immediately connected to my new friend. (Many years later I ran into this friend that I made in my class in Argentina, on a street in Washington DC with my baby son, and then even later I served as her doula via email as she waited through the last hard days of her overdue pregnancy, but that is another story)

So, since then I have loved finding these connections, and once I began to look for them I have found them everywhere. Even, within our recent move from NYC to Charleston which felt at first like such a break from everything that we knew, there have been so many of those connections with many of our new friends here.

This has got me thinking about another connection that I have been struggling to make sense of and that connection involves my painting Vigil, whose picture sits at the beginning of this post. The Realtors who worked with us to sell our house in Brooklyn were old friends of ours, I had known them for about 12 years, most of my time in NYC. They understood how much effort and really how much of ourselves we had put into our home through the renovation that we had done and they found wonderful buyers for our home who really appreciated all of the details of that renovation. I can not tell you how much it meant to us to have people taking over our home who really liked everything that we had done in our renovation, which really was a labor of love, you can read my posts about it here. These buyers also fell in love with our art work, which was hanging all over our home when they saw it. They had wanted to buy some of the pieces that we had up, but those pieces that we have hanging in our home are all pieces that we never want to part with. So, our Realtor friends ended up buying my painting Vigil for the buyers as a surprise "moving in" gift, at the big show that we had right before we left.

They told me that that they gave it to the buyers shortly after they moved in, and that they loved it. I was told that they hung it in the kitchen. Knowing that one of my paintings is there in our old home was really hard for me at first, since leaving that space was so difficult. We were so connected to that home, I birthed and raised my babies there. They took their first steps in that kitchen. We renovated that space top to bottom and we know every detail, every fixture, every nail hole. But, as I digested it over these past months I have come to find comfort in the continuity of my painting being there, a piece of me is still in that home. The title of the painting now seems so appropriate and almost prophetic.

Though we have left, it is keeping the Vigil, holding the space for that piece of ourselves that we left behind there.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France

Meant to be

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with a dear long-time friend of mine, who gave birth to her second child on Tuesday. I was her doula and a few days before we had just had our prenatal visit, in which we discussed her plans for the birth. She had a home birth for her first baby and this one as well was a planned home birth. On Tuesday, two weeks before her estimated due date she woke in the night in labor, and things progressed so quickly that the midwife and I both missed the birth! That is the first time as a doula that this has happened to me, and at first I was devastated to have missed it. I was so looking forward to supporting my good friend as she labored and birthed. Once Frank talked me down and I thought about it, and spoke with my friend, the more it became clear to me that it all happened in the perfect way for them. It all happened how it was meant to be. They were able to share the moment together, just the three of them. What an amazing, exhilarating, experience for my friend, her husband and their new little girl to share. Her husband caught the baby, placed their new perfect and healthy little girl on my friend's chest and they waited for the midwife, and everything really was just as it was meant to be.

28 hours

My client had her baby yesterday, at 2am after laboring for 28 hours, 26 of which I spent at her side. She labored like a champion, showing amazing strength, unmedicated the entire time. While it was her first baby, you would have thought that she had had nine. She stayed focused through being sent home twice for not being dilated enough to be admitted to the birthing center. The second time we were turned away, she couldn't face a cab ride home so we walked the streets of Manhattan, stopping to get her through each contraction, to the nearest hotel. As you can imagine, walking the streets with a laboring woman draws stares even here in NYC. People were so great, they cheered her on and said things like, "You're almost there!" and "You go girl!", it was so fabulous!
I spent today recovering after a good night's sleep...and today is Amazing Husband's birthday! His birthday wish was to go to the beach, so we spent the day at "our beach" as my kids call it after going there once a week all summer. I spent an hour or so there gathering these smooth rocks, collecting in nature is such a meditative restful activity for me. Once we got home the kids and I played with the rocks out on our deck, creating these installations of color. The gray scale one in the first photo is my favorite.

Wishing a happy and restful Labor Day Weekend to you all here in the US!

The Labor of Waiting

Photo taken over the Cascade mountains, northern Oregon, August 2009

I absolutely love my work as a labor support doula. I get so excited, so charged with energy when I talk about birth, my own birth experiences, and helping other moms to educate themselves. Developing a relationship with a client and seeing her through to the grand finale of her baby's birth is a sublime experience. Tears actually come to my eyes when I think about that moment of birth. So with each client, when we get down to those weeks when labor could start at any moment, those days have a special energy for me. It is the energy of waiting and of expectation.

I am fully in that place right now, today was the due date of my current client.
Each time my phone rings there is a jolt, is it her?
Each night I sleep with the phone tucked next to me, fully expecting to be awakened.

I am reminded of so many things at this time...
I am reminded of my own times of waiting when my whole body was so full with child that I ached to go into labor and days passed without that relief.
I am reminded that we are all always waiting for something, and I am awakened to how that effects our present. "What am I waiting for?", is a really good question.
I am reminded to breathe, to check in with my body more often and to consciously let the tension of waiting go.
Most of all I am reminded that even in our waiting we are laboring, constantly preparing for what is to come, for what lies barely glimpsed on the horizon.

And so I am ready. Ready at any moment to drop everything and to suddenly play my part as the drama of labor and birth unfold, and the divine enters the room.