Home Birth

I'd read the books and bought the things

http://www.babysfirstimages.com/

Loved this photo from a company,
Baby's First Images,
with several locations in Georgia.

to have on hand; a friend who was a nurse
insisted that she be there just in case.
Three textbook births before, my doctor asked
me only for the promise that I'd let him check
me after. Bigger than my other children,
clearly anxious to be born, he came so fast
I ripped and bled and bled but didn't mind
or hardly notice, not with the baby in my
arms. He came out clean, together with the
bag of water, crying loudly and what joy to
hear that sound! The nurse suggested gently
that we go on to the hospital instead of waiting,
much more blood that she anticipated, which is how I ended up alone at Lawnwood, crying when
I woke up after surgery because my arms were empty,
much as they are now. I only held him 16 years,
and now that he is gone, I think about the ripping
and the blood when he was born and how the pain
of childbirth is so quickly healed, forgotten,
but the ripping from our lives too soon, that never
goes away. The scab comes free so easily, so many
tears that fall and fall and fall, and most days we
get busy, have adapted to the silence where his
voice should be, but some days, like today,
the silence is too loud to be ignored. The cord
was cut three decades past and if I live three
decades more, the ache of my child's death,
I know, will linger still. I've talked to mothers,
fathers, who have buried children, and their
eyes well up with tears although it happened
long ago. Mothers, most especially --
their bodies have the muscle memory of birth,
which time and grief can not erase.



(c) Ellen Gillette, 2014