Chapters three and four....

Here’s the next instalment of my book.  Currawong’s very concerned that people who don’t know my blog well, will come along and read the story in the wrong order, so I should tell  you now, that if you haven’t already started reading the book that I’m posting on this blog, then you’ve got to go back a post and start at Chapter 1.

That being said, here’s the next bit.  It’s funny.  I’m finding that I’m really sensitive about this book!  It’s such a part of me, and I guess after having gone through the process I described last time of birthing it, I’m as protective of it as I am of my children.  I was sure that nobody liked it after I posted it for a whole hour and didn’t get any gorgeous comments….(ha!)  But then feedback started to come in, and I got over my jitters.  The urge to let it out into the world is proving stronger than the urge to be a wus J

So like I said before, I’d left the Blue Mountains and emigrated to South Australia, and had been in SA for about 6 months when I decided to go back to the mountains for a visit, met Currawong, and then went back home to write this book.  And I left the mountains cause it was all just too confusing.  In my time in the mountains I’d been a fundamentalist church goer, a very unpopular school girl with braces and glasses and knee high socks and below knee skirts and a head taller than all the boys, a dropout, and I disappeared for 3 years after I left home at 15 under police escort and lived with my sister in Bathurst for a while, then went overseas to Europe for a year to do the famous Aussie backpacker tour, then came back briefly to the mountains to be a Council postal clerk by day, and an RSL root rat by night, then went down to the North Shore in Sydney and sold Life Insurance, got pregnant and moved back to the mountains to become a single mother, then a goddess worshipping guided meditator, then a bisexual activist, then an almost separatist lesbian, lived with my girlfriend and our daughters and wrote for the local lesbian magazine, then left her and had a relationship with an eccentric man who worshipped the goddess Kali, at the same time as with a woman who wanted to look after me and take me to Holland………got too confused by everything and ran into a relationship with a young punk fella who had a very iconic name and a sweet heart, started a business in the main street of Katoomba and had some very big and grandiose dreams come to nothing, and then found it all too much and decided to move with my punk fella to Adelaide. 

Pulling silly faces with my best mate at school.....after losing the braces and not wearing the glasses for the shot....

Living in Bathurst with my sister

Sitting on King Arthurs seat in Edinburgh

Selling life insurance on the North Shore in Sydney.....

Being a single mother with a daughter

Being a lesbian at the beautiful Avalon restaurant in Katoomba

At the end of my time in the mountains, I could walk down the street and meet someone from church, then someone from the lesbian community, then a council worker who remembered my time there, then someone I’d slept with from the RSL, then a client from the business I was co-operating, then one of my single mother friends, then a fellow goddess circle member……..and it was just all too much.  I decided it was time to go somewhere and start fresh, without all the baggage of my past.  And Adelaide was about as far away as I was prepared to go.   The punk with the iconic name and I didn’t last long, so there I was in a new state (literally), on my own with my daughter, and trying to work out who the hell I really was after all. 

One of the first things I noticed was how I didn’t have any healthy relationships with men in my life.  So I spent some rather intense months trawling singles sites and having phone sex and talking to men on the internet to the point that I couldn’t talk to people in real life anymore.  So I cut all that out, and tried to make friends in real life, and my next big realisation was that I didn’t know how to fit in and be ‘normal’.  After sticking out so much my whole life, it had become my comfort zone, and I freaked out as much about being ‘normal’, as a lot of normal folk would freak out about being ‘different’. 

So I decided to go undercover, don some ‘normal’ clothes, get a ‘normal’ haircut, try and slide into the reality of the majority of the people around me, and enrolled in Community Services at TAFE.  I gossiped, I talked about boring shit, I didn’t tell any stories about my life, and blended in quite nicely.  And all was going well, and the strain of being ‘normal’ wasn’t too bad, and I was getting great marks…….till two strong personalities in my class started pushing my boundaries.  One of the girls who was verging on being a bit of a bully came out with her homophobia, about how she thought AIDS was a good thing, and the class clown decided to come out with his racist dislike of our indigenous folk, and I just couldn’t hold my tongue.  I literally stood up in the class with the girl speaking homophobia, and bore witness to my experiences and why I thought she was wrong.  And I also spoke very deeply about the racist fella’s opinions and what else I thought he should know. 

My cover was blown.

And would you believe it, they both thought I was awesome for it and all of a sudden I was the most popular girl around!!  Sitting next to me became a privilege, I started clubbing with the more open minded ex-homophobe, and the ex racist fella did an essay on the indignities suffered by black fella’s!  Since there was no point pretending to be normal anymore, I just moved towards wearing clothes that were comfortable for me, and celebrated getting over my normalphobia by just being me.   And people loved me for it.  And I wasn’t reacting anymore.  And I started feeling really good about who I was.  And decided it was about time to go back to the Blue Mountains and catch up with old friends and let them know how successful I was being in my new life.

Little did I know that I was about to meet my soul mate……..

CHAPTER 3 - That first glimpse.........

She’d briefly seen Balthazar that age before when she’d been walking the street with her young male lover.  Her Adonis, young and strong, full of testosterone and laughs, smooth of skin, hung like Pan.  She’d glimpsed him a few times and watched her Adonis grow in battle of preen to outshine him.  They were similar, these two men.  Similar in style and cover and show.

She and her Adonis had walked together down the busy street.  Busy with gossip, busy with conversation, busy with sights and sounds and smells, busy with memories, busy with energies.  They walked the street where everyone met whatever from their past, whichever ghost they most needed to see.  They walked and she held to his arm, his brash young innocence, his muscled good looks, his sliding blend of male and female, his love of her dominance, his obvious difference, and she watched quietly from within.  She watched the reactions to her, to him, to the couple they made, she watched the assumptions made and judgements reached, she watched the souls of others fly by her in eyeballs, she watched what people wanted from her or from their belief of who she was.  And she watched for the qualities she wanted in her next lover, as indeed she knew she’d have one, for this young one, this Adonis, this fear of invisibility, this run away from her past, was a boat that was ferrying her to the other side.  To the shore she knew she’d seek before too long, that would welcome her as its own, and show her the map to herself.  So she watched from her safe place by his side and she’d noticed him......Balthazar. 

She saw his eyes and felt consumed by them instantly to the past they’d shared, the wealth of love, the tangling images one upon the other flickered inside, and she felt drawn into the whirlpool.  She’d seen him, known him, loved him, feared him, felt him, taught him, learnt him, burnt him, claimed him sometime before....but not in this lifetime.  She wrapped him around her like a warm cloak of sanity and peace and the dark......and knew they’d meet again.

...........

He’d seen her strength and soul but couldn’t look, as he was not quite ready to see her yet.  There were a few resolutions just made that he needed to put into practice before meeting her.  He had some patterns to clear, some habits to destroy, some judgements to challenge, some thoughts to stretch.  After a history of enslavement and fear and bloodshed, there were some wounds to heal.  Some salve to supply.

He started heeding that voice from across the gulf when it whispered to him.  Started seeing other selves within.  The strength and bones of his being.  He traversed the gulf and began building bridges.  And finally acknowledged the mother.

He looked around him and surveyed the damage he’d wrought in his battle lust.  He mourned the dead, begged forgiveness from the wounded, and set about paying recompense.  And looked to the mother to see truly within.  All she’d ever asked was that he see her in himself.  See her and love her part in him.  This was all she’d wanted all that time when he’d bullied and railed against her to tell him her secrets.  And even though he thought he’d destroyed her, she existed still in every separated particle, for each particle had once been part of her.

He wept at the waste and bloodshed caused, and the information he could have gained, insights grown, had he only asked respectfully for what he hungered.

And he knew that this time he’d hold her hand.  Respect and love her.  Treat her as divinity.  Share knowledge and support and growth and learning.  Revel in her power and sex and intellect.  Roar with her humour and passion and anger.  And he recognised her as Nimue.  He knew he’d see her soon.

CHAPTER 4 - One year later......

   She shed her young male lover, and her hatred of mankind.  Shed the skin of who she’d been.  Traversed the underground and died to herself, then rebirthed into who was within.  Shed her childhood, her rape, her lost innocence, her wounds, and grew into her whole self.  Her arching sweetly sexual side.  Her dreaming shadowed passionate side.  Her amazon leather bound worldly side.  Her darkly despairing alone side.  Her philosophical truth searching theory side.  Her strong joking tough side.  All were her, all were loved, all were divine.  She was Goddess incarnate and spent time on herself and her senses. 

She created ritual and body scent, inner clothes and outer clothes, stories and experiences, mind stretches and style.  She shed her past and stepped in the flow and decided it was time to return to the street.  To bring with her the new clothes she’d fashioned in the hills.  The new tools she’d learned to wield.  To marry her worlds and heal her past. 

So she’d come to the street, to bounce energy down the sidewalk, and enthral with her raptures.  Willing and able to engage in life around her, and draw in a partner, wrapped to the soul in hunger for learning and life.  She knew her partner would be a man.

And then she saw Balthazar.

.........

He’d walked through fire and found his own insides, his poet and dancer, his singer and wit.  He’d mapped the depths of the empty hole his anger had nestled in, and drawn up plans for it’s renovations.  But he was still moored to his past in the form of a girlfriend.  A ‘you’ll do for now cause I’d rather not be alone’ companion who had come to him in shared desolation.  They’d huddled together against the storm of the wild around them, and now when he stepped out she told him to close the door against the wind.  But the outside to him was full of wonder.  Bright with promise and new faces and inner insight.  The harsh jarring of his two lives was stringing him tight, tuning his bow.  But he didn’t know where to aim yet so he awaited the sign. 

And then he saw Nimue.

.........

It was in the local pub, inured against the cold with warm clothes and a mellow joint, cold beer by the fire.  She walked round to the back room to sit with her friends and saw Balthazar sitting there, perched on a stool.  Waves of emotion washed her and she went to strike up conversation.  Told him how her young lover had been intimidated by him.  Laughed about the young male pride, gazed in each others eyes.  Communicated without words or mouths or moving.  Balthazar sat with Nimue and their worlds began to collide.

And then another day, on the busy street, they’d chanced to pass, and stopped and enticed, and went for a coffee.  Lazily conversed on spirituality and horses, sex and iniquity....and sent out fine tendrils of lust and promise.  That night at the pub again, inured against the cold by sexual hunger, they’d chatted, then sitted, then glittered their way to a hotel room to shed the clothing of outside.

The baby that came bearing gifts - Part 1

It would be easy to assume on the birth of my eighth child that I am a veteran of birth, a knowledgable birthing woman in tune with her body and the rhythms of birthing, and secure in my role as a mother and lover and creatrix of little people.  But to be truthful, the more I birth, the more I realise I know nothing about birth, or more to the point – I could birth another eight times and still feel like I was standing before a limitless vista of birthing potentials and possibilities.  And lessons to learn and fears to face.  Attachments to let go of, and sacred cows to murder……  I had so much more to say about what was ‘right and true’ when I was just beginning my birthing career.  And now I find that everything just is.  Take out the judgement and it’s all just lessons.  The more I birth, the more I realise there is to know about birth……

So to set the scene for this recent birth, we’d all just got to a really nice place with each other, after a long long time of being observed and judged and in other people’s spaces, and sorting through recent trauma’s, and were all cohesively living and loving together and playing and having fun. The description of this time was in my last posting about Love….. Lasted about a week.

Only thing we needed to settle us, and before we got serious about baby preparation, was beds, cause the rest had been catered for.  So one day we get beds, the next day we drive to get our big girl from the airport, and the next day a friend turned up with her two young girls.  That same night a fellow community member dropped in too, and it was all of a sudden too many other people in our sanctum.  We slipped into our bedroom that night and felt overwhelmed and like we’d made a big mistake.  We’d finally got to a good and private place and then invited the world into it, and gave it away, what the hell was with that? When were we gonna be free to be ourselves in our own home again?  Went to sleep feeling slightly silly, distraught and ominous, after lots of activity and socialising….

And then woke up at 3am that morning, went for a wee, and had amniotic fluids running down my legs.  Shock, denial, fear, disbelief, horror, and panic played poker for centre stage, and I woke Currawong up to tell him, so they could tap dance in his head as well.  We decided to hope for the best, believe that my bladder had finally and all of a sudden sprung a leak after all these birthing years, and go back to sleep.  I woke up at 7 in the morning, had another wee, and this time the plug came away, with a whole heap of fluid, and I knew that I had to face up to it.  I was 35 weeks pregnant, which many people would agree is far too early to be considering birthing at home, and going into premature labour which is associated with lungs not yet ready, and a hospital birth with lots of backup, care, and postnatal attention.  After talking to my birth support person, Annetta, we decided that it was safest to just ring the local hospital and go in for their help, so sadly and miserably I packed my bags and asked my big daughter and our friend who’d just turned up the night before, to look after all our babies, while we went to the hospital for who knows how long.

We got there, and I mistakenly expected all the flurries and attention of the hospital folk that you’d see in a tele drama, and instead we got mostly left in a room for hours on our own. One of my first thoughts was about a midwife friend…….who had greeted this pregnancy with a seeming prophecy (that really messed with my head throughout the whole pregnancy), about how if this baby was to be stillborn, or with special needs, or needing intensive medical assistance, then that would be fine……and I told Currawong that she’d been right.  Here we were in hospital.  Feeling really depressed.  A hardened midwife of many many years was our tour guide into the system, and at first she was horrified that I was so far into a pregnancy at my age and with my history, without having had any tests, or ultrasounds, or doctors appointments…..  She wanted to kick us out and stop us wasting her time, so we could go and do paperwork and blood tests with a doctor instead of her.  It’s a tricky thing to try and explain to a hospital based midwife that I trusted my body and the process of birth, and hadn’t seen the need for medicalising my experience or getting information that might haunt me, especially considering that we wouldn’t have aborted this child in any case.   She put one of those machines on me that needed strapping in two places to my belly, and that recorded my blood pressure, baby’s heart beat, and contractions.  Currawong and I chatted and told stories, and asked her questions about herself, till she started to thaw, and realised that we weren’t homebirth extremists, and started making comments about ‘some alternative people who aren’t as open minded as you two….’ and the like. A sad chapter in the war between homebirths and hospital births is, this woman was bitter from the attacks she’d felt from ‘alternative’ types while she was doing her job to the best of her ability over the years……and if we had reacted to her reacting to us, we could have had a very different experience. 

A young doctor came in and asked a whole heap of random questions in the hope we wouldn’t notice he was checking us out, and that was the last we saw of him.  Then there was just hours of us sitting in an unused and sterile birthing suite, chatting, making phone calls to the kids and friends, Currawong popping out for fruit cake and bottled water whilst pouring money into parking meters, looking around at the standard fare in surroundings for women and families who birth in hospitals, and having moments of tears and disappointment, as we thought we were watching our homebirth sail off into the distance.  About 5 hours later and after not seeing a doctor or having an ultrasound or having anything really checked out, our new friend the midwife came in with a pill to stop labour, tags with my name on it for my wrist, and a shot of steroids in my bum for developing the baby’s lungs, as it was premature.  6 hours later another midwife came on duty who we connected with straight away, as we all told each other how judgement was futile, and it was far easier to make peace with your own decisions, and accept other people and the choices they made, rather than fight about it.  I had another 2 pills over the next hour, and time for a huge hug and cry with Currawong, as we realised that this was really it, and I’d be staying overnight in the hospital on my own, and he would go off to spend the night with the kids.  We really don’t dig spending time apart……

7 hours after getting to the hospital, a wild eyed doctor came in, asked about the dates, and within minutes had ascertained that I’d got my dates wrong, because I’d counted from  conception, rather than the two weeks before it, when the egg had descended and become ‘alive’.  Or in plainer language, I’d counted from conception, instead of from the first day of my last period, which is when the rest of the world considers the beginning of pregnancy to be.  I wasn’t 35 weeks pregnant, I was 37!!  We looked at each other horrified, and thoughts jockeyed in my head about how I’d robbed us of a homebirth, how stupid I felt, how I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life, and all sorts of other barbs.  But in my defence, we’d counted it from conception because we both remembered so clearly how this baby was made!  And the date of it.  It was a memorable event.  Other people remember holidays or outings, but my love and I remember conceptionsJ  So as we sat there looking shocked, the doctor tried to joke us out of it, asked us about our birthing history, and got very serious when I told him that our last birth was twins born at home in water and two days apart, and told us a few times in a tut tut kind of voice that we were very very lucky that it had worked out well for us.  He also told me that I was high risk anyway because of my age, and how many babies I’d had, and because I’d had a caesarean and twins most recent.  And then finished up by saying that I may as well stay in if I was already there, and spend the night even though there was no risk and we weren’t premature after all, and have an ultrasound in the morning so they could see what was going on.  Of course they wouldn’t be giving me any more pills to slow it down, or the other shot of steroids that was coming.   

He left the room and I wailed to Currawong about what an idiot I felt.  And then I rang Annetta.  “Get out of there!  And I’ll come visit you tonight, and we’ll see what we do from there” was her advice.  And big old strapping hippy me, the alternative lifestyler, the anarchist, the system questioning one……really needed somebody else to give me permission to go.  Afterall,  once I was booked in and had the tags on my wrists, wasn’t it a given?  And a really sad consideration that was probably one of the main reasons I was in hospital in the first place, and yet another casualty of the war between homebirth and hospital birth, was the knowledge that if something ‘bad’ happened in hospital, it would be considered par for the course, but if that same ‘bad’ thing happened at home, as the writer of a blog that was rather public about my impending birth, I’d most likely be hauled before the coroners court and demonised by the mainstream media and a horde of anti-homebirthing internet activists who’d doctor my photographs so I looked like Charles Manson……  What a shame politics has entered the arena of a woman’s personal choice for a place to birth.  So I needed permission.  All of a sudden this was a totally normal birth, and it was safe to do at home, and I could exercise my rights and just…..walk…..out…..of…….there……. 

The nice midwife came back in with a very unappetising hospital version of spaghetti bolognaise, and with tears in my eyes I told her that I wanted to be back with my family, to which I was overwhelmingly happy when she totally agreed, thought it would be best, and I’m sure she gave me a veiled message to stay the hell at home, when she told me about how I could come back in the morning, and sit around on my bum for another 8 hours till they could get around to giving me an ultrasound….or stay with my family and see how labour progressed at home.  She went and worked it out with the doctor, and before you could say ‘Homebirths-R-Us’ we were getting shooed out of the room, and I took those tags off my wrists, and we scampered out of the building to the big sky, and the fresh air, and our wonderful magic bus that was going to spirit us back home.  The feeling of reprieve from impending doom was immense.  The reminder of how unspecial a hospital environment can be, even when they’re doing you the tremendous favour of helping you or saving a life, was timely.  And maybe that doomsaying midwife friend hadn’t been right after all!!  Maybe we really could pull off another beautiful homebirth.  

And as a little aside and to skip to the present, it’s only a few weeks after our birth, and already the story has spread round the area like wildfire, and friends have already heard a few times how “That woman who has SO many children, didn’t even get her dates right!”  Reminds me of when I had an emergency caesarean with Balthazar, and “that woman who’d had all those natural births had to have a caesarean, so you never can tell!!”, and there were also some nastier comments about how the ‘mighty homebirther had fallen’.  And it sits in a funny place within me.  Like a slightly uncomfortable itch that intermittently annoys.  A bit of a wrinkle in my birthing fabric.  I also got my dates wrong with Spiral-Moon, because the first day of my last period wasn’t actually the first day of my last period…..it was a miscarriage of her twin.  And I only found out that I’d got my dates wrong because I was going to freebirth her in a town 250kms away from Adelaide, and thought I should at least make sure that the placenta was in a good place and everything was going well before we did.  And you know what?  Sometimes the medical system and ultrasounds get it wrong too.  I’ve got just about every detail possible ‘wrong’ throughout all my births, and hardly ever predicted correctly which gender they were going to be.  But what I’ve learnt from my  ‘mistakes’ could fill a book, and has taught me far more than being ‘right’ all the time could have.  And in getting so caught up in getting it ‘right’, we can get so swept up in using other peoples terms and talismans that we can miss the subtle little nuances that were meant just for us.  Like how in getting my birth dates ‘wrong’, we ended up in hospital for a day, and got to really live out some of my most dastardly fears about the birth I was about to engage in the Tango with, and to really sit with them, in the hospital, with all the staff around us, and then get the incredible opportunity to break free, fly the gilded cage, and empower ourselves towards the birth that we really wanted.  What an amazingly emphatic way of working through some last minute fears and creating some clearing around them so that the forthcoming journey was made all the sweeter and stronger!!

And (to get back to the story), the first thing we did was go shopping.  I was so unprepared for this birth, that I didn’t even have a pair of knickers!  Let alone something to bleed into, or soak up my excess breast milk, or baby clothing, or wrapping cloths, or a birthing pool…..  I was especially worried about the lack of birthing pool.  Annetta couldn’t get her hands on one at this short notice, and how could I birth out of water!  Surely there was a kids pool to be bought in the megaplex that would do? But they were all too shallow or too big, and I calmed myself with the knowledge that we had a bath at home that would probably do.  Getting back home again was like a homecoming scene from the Waltons……hugs and tears and many children draped all round me asking for the story, and telling us how glad they all were that we were both back.  We settled them all down, and got them into bed, our visitor and her girls went to bed also, and Currawong went to bed early too, after our exhausting and emotionally roller coasted day, while I sat up to wait for Annetta.

She drove up in her awesome 4WD home, and parked outside, walked into the front door, gave me a huge hug and kiss, and then scooped up a baby bat that was sitting in a corner between the bathroom and hallway doors.  “You’ve got a baby bat” she said as she held the little one up, and we looked for something to hold it in.  I brought out a basket that I’d made as a meeting between crochet and basket weaving, nice and wooly like a mamma bat, and we popped it in there, till I could pass it on to my big daughter and the other kids to look after later.  We both decided it was a good omen, bats being considered good luck by many peoples, and a baby bat to boot…..  And I told Annetta about how we were all sure that this baby coming was a girl, and how Currawong had liked the name Batsheva for years, with it’s meaning being ‘daughter of seven’ which we all thought was apt.  We chatted, I told her the story of the day, we had cuppa’s, and then she checked me over, felt the head that was down in my pelvis nicely, heard the baby’s heartbeat, and checked me on the inside to see how I was going.  The only danger now was one of infection, as the plug was gone, but if I kept clean, drank lots of water, and showered regularly, all that risk should be avoided.  Everything was tickety boo, I was so relieved and greatful to be home and out of the hospital, and we smilingly went off to bed, hoping that the next time we saw each other would be early in the morning while I was in labour, and could ring the hospital and cancel that ultrasound, as my baby had come and was safe at home.

3am in the morning I woke up and started having tightenings, sat up for a while on my own, and then Jess, my big daughter, woke up and joined me.  We had a lovely time out of time together, in the endless seeming hours of the early morning, as I told her stories about how horrendous I felt when I realised that I was 37 weeks pregnant in the hospital and thought I’d ripped us all off a homebirth, and how glad I was that we were home, and how strange it was to be birthing without my mother around for the first time, and how freaked out I was about birthing out of water……  A really bonding and connecting time.  She started timing the contractions, and they were very nicely and evenly heading down a narrowing tunnel of focus towards contractions close together and getting more intense.  In between them I kept chatting, and was getting more and more excited and empowered as I realised that I could manage my tightenings out of the water!  I was finding a position that tucked my bum in, while hanging my pelvis in as relaxed a manner as I could, rubbing the top of my bum, breathing out through a wide open mouth, and rubbing just under my belly all at the same time.  Currawong woke up feeling well rested, and joined in the dance I was creating through the house and the verandah, and we were both feeling happy and like we were going to meet our baby soon.  The contractions were getting closer and closer, and Jess went out to wake Annetta.  She came in too, and the dance kept winding round the house, and in between contractions I was brilliantly alive, and intense, and telling them the magic of this baby.  This new baby was all about letting go of the old and my attachments I decided.  I’d lost my birthing necklace with the Kali cow bone bead that I’d had since Griffyn’s birth, to Balthazar bashing it to smithereens early on in the pregnancy.  I’d left my breastfeeding dressing gown at my mum’s house.  I was birthing for the first time without my mother around, and interestingly, was out of the water and out of my traditional birthing position on my back, that was the same position that my mother had birthed me.  I’d been into the lion’s den of the hospital, thinking that my anxieties and that dire prediction had won, but had been released to birth at home, and was finally able to shrug off all those negative omens!!  I was standing on two feet strongly grounded, and looking birth in the eye!  I was wearing a lanolin soaked, handspun, bird cape with a raw fleece bustle that I’d made for Tribal Fibres, as a wrap to lend me power and magic.   I was meeting birth in a different way than I’d ever met it before, dressed in power clothes, standing tall and strong, perching my pelvis in a way that relieved the pain, and with my Currawong firmly at my side, instead of running around boiling water and making sure that the bath was the right temperature.  He was just as delighted with the new fangled way that this birth was happening.  I was grinning and smiling and laughing with delight at the fears I was facing, and the new birthing paths I was treading.  It looked like we were heading nicely towards birthing in time to ring the hospital with our awesome result, and then get on with the rest of the day…..

And then our guest woke up.  She had breakfast, and was telling stories of herself and her relationship and her births, and chatting to all my people who’d been dancing with me, and the contractions started to slow.  I tried to entice her into the birthing cocoon we’d been weaving, and she joined in the dance for a moment.  But then we were hearing about her plans for the day, and her daughters woke up, and my expansions virtually came to a stop.  I was bereft.  We were heading so cleanly and strongly towards birth weren’t we?  What had happened?  How could it have gone away so completely?  I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask our guest to leave.  I needed to reclaim my birth space, and keep it sacred and for the people who were in on the dance with me, and immediate family and my birth support person only.  Our guest didn’t take it too well, and felt like she was being kicked out, and was very pouty about it, but I stayed strong.  Which was actually a really big thing for me.  Underneath the strong alternative exterior, I’m actually quite a wus, and have often given what I want over in the face of opposition.  I’ll compromise what I want to make others happy before just sticking to what I want and exactly how I want it.  But I was clear.  “This isn’t about you, it’s about me, and what I need for this birth, and who I want around me, and it has to be family only.  Bummer about the timing, and thank you for your help yesterday, but that’s just how it is.”   I organised with a dear friend closer to Nimbin for our guest and her girls to stay in their community house for a few nights, and after packing up she was gone.  And so was my birthing process that had felt like it was coming to a conclusion.

We sat around for a bit, I had a few spasmodic contractions, and tried hard to not feel like I’d failed in some way.  Annetta decided to head off for the day, advised me to rest, and said she’d be back later that night after the babies were asleep, and we’d see what happened then.  We all agreed that we’d give it till the next morning, and if nothing was happening then, we’d have to consider hospital again.  That day was a bit despondent.  I tried all the things that I knew could bring on labour….walking around, squatting, and other positions to give my body every chance to kick back into the birthing process.  The hospital rang to see how we were going, and Currawong told them that birth had been happening and then stalled, and we were waiting to see what the rest of the day brought, and if nothing had happened by the next morning we’d be considering coming back in.  But the highlight of the day was Currawong’s favourite birth starting procedure…..making love.  And this was the first time in our birthing career that it actually worked.  All the other times we’ve tried it have been with lots of people around, and as a purely mechanical antidote.  Currawong’s enjoyed it, but I’ve been unimpressed, unfocused, and interested in what it might do for my body only.  But there was no-one around, the kids were all off on a walk, there was nothing else happening, and our lovemaking session did kick off a few contractions, but that was not the main aim of the exercise anymore.  We actually had the time and space to melt into each other, and visited the special place we create together, with the added spice of immanent birth.  I climaxed quite a few times, and Currawong was crying as our bubble of us drew to a close, telling me that watching me love him was what he was born for.  That moment he was watching me, was the moment he was born to witness.  Gotta love a romantic bird man.

Birth meanwhile, had gone on a very extended coffee break, and wasn’t coming back into the space anytime soon.  The day dwindled into the night, and well fed kids went off to bed, and Currawong again went to bed early with them.  I sat alone and waited for Annetta again, sad, and depressed, and tired after two days now of little sleep and big stress.  She came in again like a breeze of hope, and just hugged me and let me hold onto her.  And then she checked me over again, checked the baby’s heartbeat and position, and we sat as she explained what she was piecing together.  After having so many baby’s, my uterus was looser than normal, and hadn’t quite contracted tight enough to start pushing out a baby.   My body had been taken by surprise by the plugs defection, and a bit like my birth preparations, just wasn’t quite ready.  There was nothing wrong with the baby either, and it seemed like the little person inside had been caught on the hop as well, not quite ready to shimmy down my birth canal.  The culprit it seemed was the fact that my cervix which, again after having had so many baby’s, had been dilated and open for quite a while beforehand, and had left the plug vulnerable and exposed to the hungry bacteria that live in every healthy vagina, which had snacked on the sweetness of my mucus plug.  And then stresses, and moving, and cleaning and the like had helped weaken it, till it came away earlier than my body and baby were ready for.  So there was nothing wrong with us, except a mechanical fault that had thrown a spanner in the works…..so to speak.  And we seriously spoke about how getting this far from the plug having come away, there was still an increased risk of infection to me and the babe inside, and I had to finally and completely let go of the idea of a water birth, as water increased the risk of infection too.  I went to bed despondent and tired, but I felt like I at least had a clearer picture about why this was happening, and that there was nothing wrong with my body or baby. 

And guess what……..I’ve reached my self imposed limit for a blog post, so I’m going to finish the story in another post.  We have another situation of a ‘to be continued’.  It may not be twins, but it goes over days again, and a lot can happen in three and a bit days!!  And sorry, but this birth was far too engaging and intimate for any of us to have bothered with taking many photo’s, so you’ll have to imagine how it looked in your minds eye………….

The story continues…..

So. A brief recap. We’d all got a bit stressed about the lateness of the second twin, then decided to sleep on it for a bit. I couldn’t sleep, and lay in bed listening to the sounds of Currawong clearing out the birthing pool, clearing the energy of the first birth, and making way for the second….

By the time I realized that no sleep was going to happen, I came out to a cleared and cleaned space, and a Currawong with a mission. He set about making food and starting to deal with the kids that were waking up. “Is there another baby yet?”…..”No, not yet”. Everyone slowly woke and we all hung out on the lounges chatting about what to do now. It’s amazing how a little bit of sleep can turn a desperate situation into one more manageable. Lisa decided to go off and do a bit of research on twin births and ring some old and trusted midwife friends, and we decided to give Russell Smith the Ayurvedic masseur a ring and see if he could help.

I consider myself extremely honoured to call Russell and Alison friends, he drums with Currawong and they inspire the hell out of each other, and is what I call a real healer. He swears, doesn’t read, smokes cigarettes, and doesn’t pull any of the ‘my shit don’t stink’ crap that so many ‘healers’ and ‘gurus’ I’ve known in my past push. He’s real, and honest, and calls a spade a spade, and has people come to him from all over the world, cause what he does really works. Alison is one of those women who makes you just wanna crawl into her lap and get lashings of mother love. She creates beautiful spaces and foods and moods, and giggles and laughs all the while. A more generous couple are hard to find. And bless their hearts, and may love and beauty rain on their heads forever more, within half an hour they were here. They just came. Russell straight away got to work on me, and Alison lay next to me chatting, spreading ease of mind like a balm. Russell started reading my body and telling me what was going on. It turns out my body had decided that it’s job was done! That was birth wasn’t it? Push one baby out and it’s over! My womb had blockages, and my uterus hadn’t contracted down, so even though baby number 2 was head down and ready to go, there was no punch from my uterus to help him out. A whole stack of fear had also locked itself in with the blocked womb, and it was all just stuck. He was massaging my feet and it HURT! And then he did all sorts of other work on my legs and by the time he got back to the bit that had hurt, it didn’t hurt anymore.

Meanwhile Lisa had come back from her research trip, Alison was pottering around cleaning the house, doing dishes and the like, and Russell got Currawong down to give him a work over too. We were all gobsmacked when Lisa reported that she’d found a statistic about the average amount of days between twins being born as 47 days….. It seems that many twins are born prematurely, and when one comes out early, they do their best to keep the second one in for as long as possible. She’d also bounced what was happening off some trusted advisors, and they all agreed that while I was healthy, and the baby  inside was healthy, there was no ‘normal’ time for twins to be born. In fact, in the days before hospital births became the norm, it was not uncommon at all for twins to be born days or even weeks apart. It’s only since birth has entered the treadmill of a hospital schedule that the second twin has only been allowed half an hour to make their own entry, before the birthing woman is induced to bring them on.

Peri-natal psychologists and midwives I’ve talked to have all found that quite often babies who are dragged into life by their legs and arms as in the case of caesareans, or induced to be born at more convenient times, set up life patterns of feeling like they’re being dragged through life against their will. Like they’re never on time to do the right thing, and that people around them are always overshadowing them and making decisions for them against their will. It seems quite stunning to me in the light of such logical conclusions about how birth sets us up for life, that we do anything apart from gentle welcomes to the world, with the mother, baby and family all being respectfully honoured in their journey.

But back to the story. I reckon I’m fortunate to be one of the few women in a western world at this point in our history, to experience the reality of having just given birth to a baby, but needing to put that baby to the side with other people holding it in the hours following the birth, because I had another baby inside me that needed to be birthed as well. I kept looking at Max and realizing that if he was a ‘singleton’ (a rather dubious term in my opinion((sounds to me like ‘simpleton’)), coined by mothers of ‘multiples’, to describe single baby’s…), I’d be holding him and staring at him and RESTING!! But it wasn’t to be. During the time that Currawong was getting a massage, my uterus started contracting. It was like the after pains you get after birthing that get more intense the more babies you have. I thought it was birthing contractions at first, till I tried moving like I did with contractions and it hurt more….I had to stay completely still for uterine contractions it seemed. Before Russell left he told me that “it would go like a bullet now..” I liked his metaphor. We were all relieved and felt like the whole experience was a lot more ‘normal’. We told Lisa she should head home and get some supplies and have a rest…none of us had expected it would be going this long! Not long after the blessed couple left, Lisa headed home for a while too. We all agreed that we were part of 2 separate births, and all was totally normal and fine.

There was a gentle and graceful pause in events for a bit of a breather. We hung out with Max and the other kids, and Currawong and I went walking round the property to walk through the contractions moving the uterus down, that slowly morphed into starting to contract a baby out. We stopped off to have a chat with some fellow community dwellers on the way, keeping them up to date with what was going on. It’s all a bit of a haze to me now, and was even receding quickly at the time, as I was still in that intense timeless space you go to in birthing. Come to mention that space, I was really into goddess chants for the sound track of these births, and had about 6 on repeat throughout the whole 49 hours…. Except for when Currawong created diversions around the fact that other music was on. For me in that timeless space it was wonderful…repetitive…. meditative…. reassuring. For everyone else it was mind numbingly annoying, but bless them all, nobody said anything to me till days after it was all over. Just ask Lisa how she likes goddess chants now……

And like Russell predicted, it did indeed progress like a bullet. Steady strong contractions that moved rhythmically in a mathematical dance through time scales to really close together. Around 9 that night I rang Lisa again, and told her that it was all on again. She got here quickly and the birth journey continued steadily till 12 that night.

When Balthazar woke up crying and wanting to jump in the pool, and Max also woke up for a feed.

It would have to be one of the most surreal experiences of my life – to be in the middle of intense birthing, contractions about 3 minutes apart, and have a crying toddler, as well as a newborn baby wanting a feed……. It totally threw me. I slipped into sergeant major mode, instructing Currawong, mum and Lisa to “take Max from me now!”, as I was about to have a contraction, and then “bring him to me now!”, as I quickly fed him before the next wave hit. Poor mum almost tripped while holding him, I had her running round so much.

Once the worst of the crisis was over, Max back asleep and the decision made to let Balthazar just hang out, I found myself at that time and intensity just before the body gets ready to push, and got scared again. I was feeling washes of memory from when I was birthing Balthazar, and he was held up so high by the cord round his neck that he could only lower his bum so far, which was lucky, cause if he had engaged he would have been strangled. But during the time of trying to bring a breech baby on, I’d stuck my fingers inside myself and been able to feel his soft squishy skin, but he never came out that way, he was cut out by caesarean instead. So I was having flash backs, and exhausted, and awake for two days previous, and at that full on time in birth when I knew it was almost over, and it wasn’t happening. My body had birthed Max so beautifully and easily on it’s own, I just had to step back and let it happen. But my body wasn’t effortlessly pushing this baby out. I started getting full of fear again. What if this was as far as we could get on our own and had to transfer our whole show on the road and to the hospital? What would they say to a baby that had been born two days before and another inside me? Had we come so far only to end up in another emergency caesarean experience? Were all my fears about not being able to perform coming to fruition?

Everyone else was equally tired, and trying their best to keep my flagging spirits up, but I started to get stalked by fear again. My body wasn’t taking over the show and letting me sit back in the directors seat anymore. I could feel that everything was in place, but rather than just submit to strong contractions to hug my second baby out, I found I had to physically push and grunt and yell and scream and WORK to get the second baby down the birth passage. After about 12 at night, when Max and Balthazar woke, I felt like the whole process flagged. Then the fear hit, and at about 1 in the morning I realized that my fears were actually having a physical impact on this part of the birth journey. I told Lisa to remind me to tell her what was happening for me around that time, because I didn’t want to speak it and give it power. But at about 2 in the morning I was still pushing hard, yelling and grunting, and we were still getting nowhere. I slipped down again. In this roller coaster of a birth story, this bit was the hardest and darkest.

Around this time everyone else was off doing stuff, and it was just Lisa by the side of me in the pool. She knew what was going on. I broke my promise to myself to not tell her about the fear again until after the baby was born, and told her what was happening for me. She looked me in the eye and said in a voice full of compassion and feeling, that she was really sorry that the whole caesarean experience had happened to me. And it was really good to hear. Made me cry….. 

After all the working out and about and around and through my caesarean experience, this felt like a final let go. I surprised myself, and maybe her too, with coming right back with all the reasons why I was glad that it had happened, and how many of my birthing fears I’d faced through that time that I’d survived, and the compassion and  understanding I now felt for other women who had caesareans, instead of the smug homebirthcentric perception I’d had before, and how much I’d learnt about myself and my body, and all of a sudden the show seemed to be back on the road! There was nothing left to fear I remembered! I’d dealt with what I’d been given before and only gained learning and insight, so no matter what happened now, I knew I had the skills and the ability to gracefully travel through it. This little moment didn’t miraculously change the whole situation into a movie like dream ending, but it certainly gave me the ‘oomph’ I needed to keep grunting, and yelling, and pushing my second baby out. No beat-poet, hippy birth this time! I reckon from about 12 at night till 4.05am when my second baby was born were the hardest, longest, scariest and most physically and emotionally intense hours of my life. It seemed to take forever. And then some. 

And then just a little bit more. 

And not to forget the last bit. 

And the bit in the middle.

I think you get the point.

And then at 4.05 in the morning of Monday the 23rd of August, 49 hours after my waters broke to begin the entry of Maxamillion, a little baby was born in the sac. Which burst just before coming out. It was like opening the most amazingly soft, velvety present I’ve ever been given, pulling the membranes from the head and trying to work out which gender we’d been gifted with. Like I said before, all the odds were on a girl baby being the second one out of my womb. Through the birth I’d been mentioning fairly solidly how my ‘little witch girl’ was on her way, and wondering what she’d look like, and telling ‘her’ to hurry up………..the first thing I said was, “It’s not a boy is it!?!?!”

It was.

Hale, healthy and hearty, a big sized boy with a round head from being born in the sac, and the largest baby I’ve ever pushed through my birth canal. At the end of a long birthing and previous baby born. Born in the water and at home, without any need to disrupt the bubble and go anywhere after they were born. After pulling off his sac, and holding him to my breast like I always do, I got some time to look at him. He looked like Burt bloody Newton. It took me a little while to get over that one.

Griffyn had woken up just before he was born, and came out as he was being caught. Balthazar was watching, wrapped up completely in the experience, Jess, Oma and Lisa were all around the pool, and Currawong was standing behind me. I was on such a high, it was OVER! And had been ultimately allright…. The end of my birthing career was a roaring success. Now it was done I started to feel quite euphoric. Tired, but euphoric. I went to sit on the lounge with him, (the name Merlin Radbod didn’t quite make it till a few days later), and did that staring thing I do after a baby is born. The placenta was born, and it was finally and completely over. We had a homebirth, waterbirth of twins, a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Caesarean), grand multiparous, epic, that had a happy ending.

And here’s the weird thing. Lisa hadn’t been able to work out why the first umbilical cord of Max’s had kept pumping blood, and had gone to a serious amount of effort to ensure it was kept clamped. And the reason why was that there was only one placenta. Non identical twins are meant to have separate placenta’s, and if they do join up, you can see where they’ve merged. No fusion line or connection of two separate placenta’s was evident, it was just one enormous placenta with two umbilical cords and a membrane between the two boys. And had kept pumping through Max’s detached cord. How bizarre is that……

Now at this point you may be tempted to say that no wonder it worked out so well, as I was an experienced mother of 5, and Lisa was an experienced midwife of decades, and of course we were trusting birth and being zen with the whole situation, but you’d be mistaken. We both had serious limits being tested and boundaries being pushed. And were worried until the very end. But maybe both a little prone also, to hoping for the best. And it paid off for us all.

So. Successful outcome of two healthy babies, happy family and midwife, and a homebirth to boot, and Lisa sweeps through the house like a spring morning breeze and makes sure that everyone’s settled and covered and warm and fed and happy and packed and headed off home, and JUST as she left, the other girls started to wake and I looked around in despair, suddenly completely and thoroughly exhausted, and completely daunted by the beginning of another noisy day in our home. My big 17 year old Jess walked up and demanded Merlin, told Griffyn to take Max, instructed mum to take the three other kids to her house for the day, and told us we could sleep while her and Griffyn looked after the babies. And through serendipity and providence, we all got some well earned sleep.

And it was really good.