(postscript)

Some days I think, This gotta stop.

All these scattered thoughts that stream out of my brain, and my heart, that I want to pin down, in intricate and exquisite designs, across the journal of my life, for vanity’s sake, so my children and grandchildren can look through my journal and marvel over my gorgeous words, experiences and thoughts.

But no, the words fall in crumbles around my feet, get stepped on, dragged around, and, lost.

Of course after posting Lyra’ birth story I thought of some things I could have touched on. Those details that make the icing of it all. The deep breathing, the leaning into and onto loved ones, the air, the stream of sun-dust through the window… and a myriad other details. The ferocious hunger, the slant of light, the sounds, the smell of tender new life interlaced with grief.

All these, over. I cannot pull them back into focus and describe in detail, fill in every pixel of information. That’s ok, I just have to let it go. Maybe one day I will have time to sit down in a rocking chair, hot chamomille-rose tea in cupped in my wrinkled and coarse palms, to re-savor every little moment in my life. Maybe. One day. Who knows?

++

One thing I did not address in my previous post that I wanted to, was the regret of not having a homebirth. Or perhaps, the not-exactly-having-a-regret-of-having-a-homebirth. Yes, I had this dream vision of a water home-birth out in the backyard, amongst trees, when pregnant with Ferdinand. I wildly wanted that to happen, but it did not. With Lyra, I know that vision will not happen, but I still wanted to have a calm, beautiful birth. It was not exactly calm, since I was one yelping banshee, and I am pretty certain all of us present at her birth had our hearts leaping wildly and banging crazily against our chests, so nothing was calm about her birth. But it was beautiful. It was bloody, sweaty, quivering and wild, but beautiful.

I decided to leave out the discussion of home- versus hospital birth in my post, because I felt it was no longer important. It need not be one or the other, with one being superior. As my girls sometimes demand, “Why do we have to choose?” Exactly, why not have chocolate AND vanilla AND strawberry AND mango AND pineapple AND sprinkles AND whipped cream?

It would have been lovely to have real, flckering candles and not that LED tealight. It would be nice to watch the birds flit and observe the leaves sway while I try to push out a baby, instead of manoveuring around the straps and needles and tubes. But ultimately, what really and truly mattered was what I did and who was with me, and where my mind and my heart were. When I think of her birth story now, the details of whether there were candles or not faded into the unimportant background, what jumped to the fore-front was how my entire being was quivering and over-powered by love and a respect for life and death, how the temptation to grip was so strong in the face of fear and surrender (leaning into the power of fear, with screeching winds whipping your face, was truly a transformational experience), and how she was born into a net weaved of love and intense anticipation.

So, I decided that discussion of one or the other was meaningless. Let there be choices, bold choices.

(And by the way, while I finish up this post, I realized Kate had touched on this topic and wrote a powerful and magnificent post on it, read it here.)