I come up from a deep vacation from all things computer.  It felt good to disconnect and lay in the grass, gather tulips, travel across the country, cook meals and sleep.  Now it feels good to write this, to share something dear ones have asked me to share.  A new community has been born and it is important to know it exists.

***

My grandmother lost 4 of her 13 children.  Two stillbirths, one random and youthful heart failure, and one she watched get run over by a drunken truck driver at the age of 9.  My heart always burst and bleed when anyone spoke of her lost ones  (she passed before I was born so I never heard her own mouth speak of them).   When I asked my dad how his mother  handled such tragedy, he shrugged.  I dunno honey, that was life back then, you had kids, you lost them. There was no time for pain, she had to get us through the Depression. Even though I tried to hear the truth in that answer, my deep intuition was that nobody knew how she mourned her lost children, because nobody held her through it.  She was the single mother and she had a family to feed and a store to run.  There wasn’t time for others to allow her journey to be witnessed and felt.  I am not saying she didn’t go on it, but she most likely went through it alone, in the silent sobs in her pillow at night, careful not to wake the children who all shared one room with her.   She was expected to let those children go and move on, ignoring the process of grief, absent the vehicles of expression, without a community to hold her while she mourned.  And that is sad.  It is heartbreaking.  It makes me want to fall back in time and hold her hand and tell her it’s okay to collapse in pain and scream for help and crack open and bleed.  It’s okay to need forever.

 Just about a year ago, when my new daughter  was the size of a bean in my womb, I was driving from the ocean back to the desert when my cell phone rang.  Shocked that I had service in the middle of that vastness, I answered it. The connection was crackling.  The voice on the other end  was serious, Have you been online? To Kate’s blog? I hadn’t been near a computer in three days.  She had the babies, the twins were born, an emergency cesarean.  My heart skipped a few beats as I calculated how early they were.  Just as I was about to cry we lost reception. The wise woman came out of me and I prayed.  I prayed and sang mantra.  I remember that drive like it was yesterday. 

Then it turned into June and it was hot.  I was awaiting the phone call from Leigh, telling me her water broke so I could light candles for her and keep sacred her birthing space.  I was sitting at my big blue kitchen table while the sun beat on my forehead through the wall of windows, I watched my girls play in the kiddy pool outside.  Mia was covered in orange paint and washing it off her while painting more on her sister. I desperately tried to keep down my raspberry leaf tea down because my morning-all-day-all-night pregnancy sickness was overwhelming me with gags and chokes and sudden bursts of vomit.  The phone rang.  It was Leigh. Her voice was not  the voice of a laboring woman, instead it was sound of a sister in concern: Have you been to Kate’s blog?  I hadn’t but I quickly clicked there.    The post The Gift of Liam echoed through my soul.  She lost her son.  She lost her son.  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Every fiber in my body screamed, this is not right, it couldn’t be, he was just going to be tiny and someday he’d be stronger and him and Ben would be double trouble and maybe he’d grow up and just need some glasses and some help in school and oh Jesus Christ this is so fucking horrible. He said no to this side of the Universe.  He had needed a bigger view of all of us, a space to surround with powerful love.

***

For months I read SatNam Baby, the name my friend gave her pregnancy journal which she was so gracious to share with her circle.  Janis wrote every ounce of herself and her journey growing this third life inside of her.  Her little boy and the wisdom he pass through his mamas hands guided me through my own sick and tired and emotionally wrecked pregnancy moments.   Each day I’d open my email and find the words of Janis and her Star Baby. I’d feel so much better reading of her exhaustion, raising her daughters while holding life inside and keeping herself smooth and pliable.  I felt her company.  And also her ancient way of Just Being in her writing.  If I didn’t know she was a young and vibrant woman, I would have imagined she was an old shaman, wrinkled and sun stained skin, hands kneading, sitting on a rocking on a chair and dictating her words to someone else, a student to type. She reminded me to chant my own Sat Nam, calling upon my inner truth, my infinite truth, the truth of the baby that I held within, the truth of all babies we all hold within.  The truth of birthing into being.

The day I received the news, in an email written by her own hands, I began to lose hope, my faithful  fire in life was smoldering.  Her Ferdinand came to her arms breathless, full of heart whose beat was lost to human ears.  I just waited for my own child to go.  How could I keep mine when these mothers had to let theirs go?  How? The reality that I had no control in life whipped me down like a tsunami.  When we choose to birth we open death’s door, unconsciously inviting the Night to come through and steal away the bright morning bloom.  This is to be human.  And no matter what, nobody can be prepared for it, nobody can give back to  those who have had to surrender a child.