My Story

People call me an earth mama, I make art, eat orgainic food, drink herbal concoctions, do yoga and as my brother put it: Im the last person he would have thought would have a cesarean.
Still, I was surprised at the huge reaction I had to having a cesarean section -besides just not much liking having emergency surgery and the trauma of fearing for my babies life, I struggled to relate to what had just happened. I felt a bit like I had been swallowed by medical machine that had taken over my body, invaded me with plastic tubes, dizzying narcotics and faceless people who looked right inside the depths of my body. Yet this same alien system had produced my beautiful baby.
I felt compelled to find out as much as I could about cesareans. I searched my local library catalog and found myself looking at a list of books topped by one called Not Of Woman Born.
This was how I felt. Somehow I had brought forth a baby without him being born.
I really wanted to find a way to pull his birth back into myself, to accept that I had birthed him. He had been brought forth from my body, covered in my blood, even if I didnt know the exact moment we became two.
I was hungry for information.
Pouring over the medical intervention chapters in my pregnancy books and talking to everyone I knew who had one just brought me tears not progress.
I had my first moment of reconnection when I read about tribal people in Africa, shamanic healers with well developed methods of performing cesarean births long before they were common in western cultures. Even though Im obviously not a tribal African, I felt I could relate to the earthiness of those people performing cesareans by torch light.
I found a first step in re-finding me.