heart space.
Baby’s heart arrhythmia is still heard. I’ve gone back and forth from being very laid back and unconcerned about the whole thing to feeling stressed and pressured (by myself) to take the medical route and get testing done to find out if it is benign or possibly not benign. The chances of it being possibly not are so slight and rare that I am naturally pulled to a place of peace for the most part; a place where I trust my mother instinct that tells me Baby is perfect.
Apparently like 1% of babies in the womb have arrhythmia’s but out of those something like 97% are totally benign (these are not exact numbers, but never count on me to be exact) and the skipped beat is a natural little glitch that corrects itself by birth, sometimes just after birth, and sometimes a person can live a whole life with one and have no additional heart issues.
Of course there is the choice to get tested, and the question kept arising….what if? And that question led to are you crazy for not just wanting to find out? Even if you have a better chance of winning the lottery than for this baby to have a heart condition? I was always under the impression that my inner knowledge about creation/gestation and this process was more accurate than any monitor could ever tell me. As a matter of fact, the reason I have always stayed away from any kind of ultrasound (even thought I did get my first ultrasound ever with this baby at 14 weeks for some kind of due date clue) or testing is from a deep knowing of myself: I fear that monitors might take from me my flame of wisdom to a dwindled down pile of gray ash. Medical technology is good, but for the sick and dying, not for my personal healthy, normal pregnant self . But to turn my back on it now? What if I just don’t know if this is a healthy and normal pregnancy? What if my intuition has failed me? What if I am wrong and I am a fool for not taking the step for intervention? What if something is wrong and I make the wrong choice and I am a horrible mother and person?
Because of the choices I am presented with and the questions that came out of the choices, B and I had the brief thought we would just go and do the testing, which would entail traveling down to the Seattle area to see a cardiologist and get the echocardiogram (the test that is usually done in these situations) to let our minds rest ease when someone would tell us all is well.. We joked that it would get us down to the city; use it as an excuse to make an overnight trip of it; exploring and slurping up a metro-center we know little about. It would be a celebration because we were sure we would be told all is well and baby’s heart is in perfectly working condition. If we did the test, there could be three things the cardiologist might tell us: 1). Everything is totally fine and normal. 2). There could be something wrong and baby will need to see a specialist immediately after birth, which could mean having hospital birth with a cardiologist on call in the Seattle area. 3.) Urgent: We need to get this baby out right now this second (via surgery). The latter two things being said very, very rarely. Almost never.
I looked in my midwives eyes when we listened to baby’s heart thump through the waves of the Doppler at the next appointment. Her eyes were watery blue and placid. She was so laid back about it, explaining she may have seen 100 women in her experience as midwife whose babies had this kind of arrhythmia and out of 100 she doesn’t remember any of them being a concern. She felt that my baby’s heart is strong and steady. But also, she wanted us to do what we felt right doing. We told her we’d think about it some more.
Then I turned to my dear L, who heard in my voice my wavering back and forth between feeling fine and ready to crack and loose it over this situation. I expressed my concern with going down that path, that slippery slope of medical intervention when there doesn’t really seem to be a dire need for it. My concern was what if some inadequate doctor thought something was wrong and we underwent surgery only to find out baby was fine? She reminded me that Cardiologists are not in the business of scaring women into Cesareans; they are heart specialists and maybe hearing someone tell me that all is fine with baby would put all my worries to rest. I liked hearing this from her. She validated the side of me that wanted ‘to know’ in a scientific, printed out on a piece of paper and signed sort of way. She made me feel okay about the part of me that wanted to run to a doctor even though I know there are no such things as guarantees.
I also spoke with my old friend B, midwife apprentice and all around magical being. She assured me that it happens all the time and that there is even a chance that my lattes and chocolate obsession could be part of the whole thing. We laughed that my two shots of espresso and bite (okay fine, BIG bite) of dark chocolate a day could be re-wiring little one’s heart. I’m jolting the baby all up. We both agreed with two other little one around, my small amount of caffeine was what I needed not to pass out behind the wheel. But maybe if I took a break for a couple days and then listened it would sound different. Regardless, I felt so at peace hearing her say this.
And I turned to M, my midwife for Sula and my care giver for the first 20 weeks of this one’s inner life. She suggested I get a fetascope from A, my midwife. She thought we could spend everyday listening and getting to know baby through its heartbeat, listening to its subtle and obvious patterns. To get to know what was going on inside my, inside baby, inside it all. And I can read between the lines well with M; as I am sure we both believe the heart speaks in a deeper language then just electrical beats, the heart pounds the ancient knowledge of the soul. The heart, at one time was considered the organ of thinking by ancients; the heart is all-knowing. Listening to that beat, quietly, would tell me much about my baby. She spoke from her intuitive being when she told me she really felt Dove was just fine. And then of course, I turned to my mother, and in the end, the worry-wart of all worriers said:
Why go down that road? Everything is just fine. Your baby is fine.
Simply put by the woman who gave birth to me and six others without any complications.
And so each night by the fire we place the fetascope on the belly. We search around baby’s little limbs, butt, back, and head, gentle pushing the ‘scope in place until we hear it speak to us:
Thumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthum[space]
Thumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthum[space]
Thumthumthumthumthum[space]
Thumthumthum[space]
Space. It has been such a theme in my life. And when I think of it in terms of what I long for or what inspires me, what brings me to myself, I seem stop worrying that it exists in the heart beat of my baby. The absence of anything, the Nothingness between Everything, that little pause, the open, endless, stillness; where nothing reveals All. Instead of something being wrong, I can’t help but question if I am being given a gift through that missing beat? How carefully can I listen to that split moment of silence in time and what will I hear?
I am always the most taken in the moments of Space. When B has me listen to a new rhythms or songs he’s created, primal sounds usually thick in the reverb, heavy on echoes and saturated with dub, I am pulled deepest in the song during the empty parts, between endless echo and the next drop, there is always a moment when the music ceases to exist. It is there, at that spacey spot, I feel it’s magic. Or in a poem or prose, read aloud, the moment the reader pauses, I am grounded, feeling the words vibrate, resonate inside me and here is where I feel the writing wisdoms. And it’s not in the thickest part of the forest where I feel the divine presence of the gods, it is when I step out of the pines, and see the sky, feel the open air, and come across the meadow. This is where my soul sings with thanks with what I learned in the dark walk at the bottom of thick and towering trees.
When I breath deeply in attempts to meditate it’s not the in or the out breath that brings me the peace, it’s the small space at the bottom and top of each in and exhale that I find a glimpse of myself; a moment of self- realization. In my yoga practice, it’s never in the pose that I reap the benefits of the stretch, it’s in the stillness, the release that happens just afterwards. It’s in that space I discover the healing.
I don’t doubt for a moment there is not a deeper meaning here, a lesson for me to learn and to grow from. This baby has been nothing less than guru and god to me. For him/her to ask me: mama, listen carefully, to this beat, or perhaps the space of the ‘no beat’, is to learn more about myself, about the baby, about the universe in which spirals in and around both of us. Or perhaps baby just demands me and B to sit still each night with hands on baby, quiet, paying attention which always winds up turning to into a deep conversation about the love we have for baby, about what it will be like when we get to curl against it’s flesh each night. The whirl of the day with our wild girls sometimes keeps us from adoring baby up-close and personal…and from the words of M, this baby wants to be adored.
And so we adore. We adore the two hearts that live inside me right now. We adore the hearts that surround us. We adore the Heart of the World, the beats and arrhythmia’s that happen to each of us on a daily basis. Don’t we all expect to hear or see or be something that seems to always be there and sometimes it’s just not there? It’s gone. We can look and search and poke and prod and try to figure out why it’s gone. We can work harder to achieve it or win it back. We can artificially insert it. We can fill our life with things to do or just plain things to fill up the space that seems so empty all of a sudden. We can wallow in it and sob about it and be angry at it. We can fight the emptiness. But maybe in the end, the absence, if we let it happen, listen to it, honor it, it becomes exactly what we have always been searching for.
Thank you Baby.
