A letter to my baby that never was

Induced early birth (Part I)

A year later, 2018.

I have been working with Uta (Kotodama) through her gathering: Feeding the Astral Umbilical. Four weeks in company of others who have also experienced early birth. Four weeks of tending to voice, womb, umbilical centre and heart through embodied rites and contained sharing. It’s through the slow pacing of Uta’s methodology that has ignited my desire to feed and tend to what she has referred to as our water babies. I have heard, and used the term spirit babies, but never through the water element. This expression connects me to those who were once of spirit and came to me through water, but did not bloom within this earthly realm. Water babes connects me to how we were once connected together and how close they came to being alive.

My salvia and tears remember, my perspiration and blood remembers.

Drawing on my study of yogic practise, I open to the possibility that perhaps our babies can traverse all the elements.

Ether babies of spirit and stars, intangible and magical, untethered and free, to be in communion and guidance to parents on earth, connected always.

Water babies of fluidity, existing as sperm and ovum united, embedded in watery blood and womb tissue, swimming in amniotic fluid, passing through the dilating portal of woman through molten blood, not gestated long enough to be considered death - except maybe to their mothers.

Air babies who come down from spirit, whose lives are spent mostly in womb waters, oxygenating through their umbilicus, breathing through their mother, those who make the laborious effort to earth, who may just take their first breath or may not, those born still.

Earth babies who join the tangible world, journeying through ether, water and air, stretching from their mother’s wet membranes, unyoking from their placenta, breathing autonomously to engage with this terrestrial life.

This one didn’t come through as quickly. Fire babies can alchemise all elements, from spirit to water, through air to earth, living and completing the cycle of life where at the end is sacred ceremony and smoke ritual, cremation as rebirth. Fire that breaks down matter, smoke that rises back to the skies of ether… body that returns to soil and waters.

I’ve been conversing with my water babies. I swill those English words, water babies, in my mouth. It doesn’t feel like enough. Uta generously uses a word from her lineage to honour her water baby. I nod toward my ancestors, to see how it might feel to call my water babies what my foremothers could have called them:

Acqua tesoro through my mother’s line, or

Leanbh uisce through my father’s line.

Honouring up the family tree as well as tending down towards my family roots too.

Connecting them below and above, for they are all together now.

It is only I who is earth bound.

Right now, as I extend the invitation of cocreation and hope to become a mother, it feels comforting to think of my babies the way they are connected to the elements. Acqua tesoro, he who came to me through the watery realm, leanbh uisce, she that were then released to the waters of my home and out towards the sea.

I love communing with my ethereal babies. I visit the memories and experiences with tenderness and understanding now. With love, reverence and compassion for those younger versions of myself. I wish so desperately that I could have midwifed myself back then when I didn’t know any better. When I wasn’t sure how to ceremoniously convey the bigness of maiden-not-quite-yet-mother. It’s as though the mother set fire to the feet of the maiden, but the maiden stamped it out. The maiden not yet ready to relinquish control so she led the cortège. Now, I feel my mother part anticipating her own arrival and I’m ready to embrace the next rite of passage.

After I induced my first early birth, I started my journey with therapy (with much resistance) and received a clinical depression diagnosis. I felt alone, guilty and isolated. I couldn’t understand the complex polarity between making a decision in total autonomy and at the same time hating myself for it. I participated in the break down of my relationship. He worked away and I felt unsupported. I didn’t know how to ask for the support I needed either. Somehow I knew I wanted to birth in the comfort of my home and away from prying eyes and clinical hands. But unfortunately, there was so much dissociation with my experience that the timeline is unclear. I know it happened at the end of May, because I had three friends celebrate their birthdays over the weekend I birthed early and I had to lie about the reasons I couldn’t go.

So while it feels easy now, 7 years on to have closure and compassion for my experience, I reread this story once a year, around the time I released my acqua tesoro as a way of tending to them and me. So much has changed since that experience, but these words feel as important to me now as they were back then.

To our son (or daughter),

Whatever your name could have been, this is how I found out about you.

I met your father at a grocery store and we exchanged smiles instead of numbers. It was a glimpse of my future before I packed my bags and left the country. I travelled, laughed, surfed and scootered. I ate on sandy shores, camped on islands and sailed over oceans. Upon my return your father and I crossed each other’s paths twice. More smiling, but no words. The third time we finally broke our silence.

Months passed until one morning I found myself on the porch listening to the waves breaking. Feeling the cool, salty breeze on my warm skin and eating slices of rockmelon for breakfast. Within minutes it ended up in the toilet bowl. I gave myself three days of denial before I took a test and those two little lines appeared. A baby. You.

Your father flew home from work. Doctor appointments and consultations. Blood tests and ultra sounds. We were told that you were 6 weeks and 1 day old. We were given a due date for your arrival and you appeared on the screen, the size of a lentil. Your heartbeat flooded the room and it was the first time I saw your father cry since I had told him about you.

More white rooms and clipboards. Hushed voices and pamphlets. $500 for 5 pills. They wouldn’t let me leave until I took the first one.

Would you have had curly hair like mine? Olive skin like ours? My stubbornness? His persistence? My nose? His eyes?

A glass of water in the doctor’s room and a little, white, round pill. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to swallow. A silent car ride home. 4 more pills. Dizziness and tingles. Nausea and disorientation. Warping walls and swaying floors. And with a fate no different than a dead goldfish you were flushed away.

I gave you a name. I wanted you to haunt me.

That’s when the pregnancy announcements began. Not one, or two but three. Three friends and three mothers to be. Due dates all within a week of each other. Darling, you were due then too.

Can I tell you how I think ideas work? I think ideas are alive. The idea could be for a novel, a new business venture or maybe as simple as a recipe. It’s an intangible energy that wants to be born. When it chooses you, it wants to be made through you. The idea will slip into your mind and under your skin and start to unravel. But I have a tendency to be neglectful and apathetic. To place my ideas on a shelf for safe keeping. A project I can come back to later. But ideas are effervescent. They need attention and collaboration. The vigorous concept is going to flee and find a more worthy creator without it. It’s why when you see your idea come into fruition through another being it’s hard not to dwell and think that was my idea.

After you were gone I knew that you came to me so that I could bring you into this world. I hoped and prayed that you would come back when I was ready, but I feared that you had already left to find your mother elsewhere.

Work gave me a ticket to the Philippines and promised a future in travelling around the world. I went, I worked, I partied but I ached to come home. I fastened my seatbelt and a scratchy voice over the intercom announced delays on the tarmac. Something about a passing storm. I nestled into my seat and convinced myself I had done the right thing by you. The right thing by me. I nursed a hangover and placed my hands on my flat belly. Once your home, now vacant. Unoccupied and empty. Rain streaked down the windowpane and my tears followed their direction.

A week before you were due one of those three mothers had her baby. He was soft and warm and gentle. Happy, healthy and alive. His mother gave him your name.

Unknowingly pregnant - 2017.