My womb sent me dreams about the two babies I miscarried

My womb sent me dreams about the two babies I miscarried…

I am sharing this because I feel called to let women know what it means to be your own oracle. When we are in the middle of an initiation it doesn’t feel like it, it feels like suffering, sometimes fighting the experience, before we surrender into it and become open to its wisdom.

I came to birth work from initiations of pleasure, to womb work from initiations of pain, but truly the pleasure and pain are intersected and overlap and sometimes you cannot tell one from another. The mystery is not done with me yet, there are deep paths to travel and for me the boundaries between life and death become more blurred every day.

I have shared these stories with only a couple of people, and no doubt some spirit baby mediums would tell me I am incorrect… in fact one medium did when I opened up about my experience. Spirit babies are apparently supposed to come back to you. I have heard this to be true and several women I know have experienced the soul coming back. The beauty about womb wisdom is that we do not need to rely on outside validation for our insights. The beauty of the mystery of the soul is nobody has the definitive answers.

The first baby I miscarried last year came to me in a dream a week later. He was a sweet baby boy and I knew instantly that he was not mine and I would not be keeping him. I knew that he had another mother and our time together was going to be brief. I asked if I could breastfeed him just once, and she said yes, and I put him to my breast for one feed and handed him over to her loving care. This dream was so comforting – what did this soul appointment mean for me and for him? He was going to his true mother who loved him deeply.

The second baby I miscarried recently was a much harder experience and very physically painful. I knew they were not going to stay, experienced a nervousness I had never felt before in any pregnancy. I told my friend Sam and she shared that her pear tree had a baby pear tree, and we should come and get the baby one to grow alongside our baby. My husband dug up the baby pear tree to bring home with us and we realised it had no roots of its own and would not grow. Dread filled me and Sam told me she also knew in that moment the baby would not stay.

The soul also came to me in a dream a week or so later. The baby was a girl who had not been wanted by another mother and was seeking a new one, and there was a choice between me and another mother who had different things they could offer the soul.

Ultimately I was not chosen, which was very sad but I did feel through the physical experience of miscarrying that something had been cleared from the womb that I had not been able to do myself, and that our time together had a deep purpose for both of us.

I am so grateful for these dreams from the womb that remind me when it comes to death, life, conception, there is no blame, there is no guilt. There are only souls finding their way through the time/space reality, making choices, healing each other, teaming up together and parting ways. I have been in a grief space these last few weeks and was able to release more sadness over the weekend, which is why I feel the time is right now to share.

As women we experience divinity through the holy animal that is the body, through being bearers of life and death. We do not need anybody to tell us our experiences and intuitions are real or not real. We are the oracle.

Do women really "birth how they live"?

Do women really "birth how they live"?

I have had several women bring this phrase to me that has been bandied about in freebirth circles and I wanted to explain what I understand about this phrase versus how it is used.

On a general level it is true that often we can make educated guesses about a woman's life story by the birth choices that she makes, if her previous feminine initiations have been in power or powerlessness, how she feels about authority, how comfortable she is in her own body, how much she trusts her own judgment.

This can reflect in how willing she is to accede to unnecessary intervention and an experience in which somebody else is wielding all the power.

Unfortunately, this phrase is usually used to denigrate women who have medicalised births, the implication being that they are somehow oppressed, weaker, or less than. By contrast, it holds the home and freebirthing mother up as a paragon of anti-establishment, natural health, pro-woman, whatever other positive groupthink attribute you wish to give her.

This dichotomy is simply not true. Anybody who reads the news knows there are women who are scared of birth and who would hand over the control to somebody else if they could who have babies in their cars and bathroom floors with no medical professional every day.

Most of the time, the body does what it's designed to do whether or not we believe it can or we feel good about it. Grantly Dick-Read's whole book Birth Without Fear was inspired by one such woman who knew so little about birth she didn't even know it was supposed to hurt.

This phrase also doesn't take into account that birth is an *opportunity* for transformation. For the woman who has been made to feel powerless, now she says no more and is reborn from the fire that cleanses and renews. For the woman who is so amazed by what her body has done it sends her down a rabbit hole into other ways she can liberate herself and others.

For some women, birth trauma gives her a warped and ugly key that eventually unlocks the many doors of her past and future and like the goddess Inanna she is able through a huge effort to rise from the underworld into her power.

Work as a doula long enough and you will learn never, ever to make assumptions about how a woman will birth. For some women, the surrender of natural birth is the gateway to healing. More rarely, the surrender comes from accepting a change of pathways and a medicalised entry into motherhood.

Birth is the journey of the soul, the mother's and the baby's. The woman surrenders to the new life moving through her as she is decimated and rebuilt as a mother and the baby chooses it's entrance into the world. The baby's soul is coming from a place of such love and deep time that if we were able to truly perceived the vastness of that soul's journey we would release any limits our conscious mind places on it.

As freebirth and home birth community members, as much as unnecessary medicalisation is infuriating, as much as perhaps we have had to fight for and educate ourselves for our births, we need to be humble enough to admit that *we don't know* what makes some births go well and others not, by our limited perception.

It's trendy these days to put out polarising statements about natural birth that people can flock to and band together to give them a sense of solidarity and the illusion of control over the medical system and even birth itself.

Let's not turn what should be thoughtful, curious and expansive conversations with women about their initiations past and present into social media quips.

At this point the birth world is a minefield with everybody claiming to have the answer. Just accept birth is science, just stay out of hospital, just do what the doctor tells you, just remember it isn't supposed to be painful. Illusions of control. As the midwife in The Birth House says "ain't no exact way to have a baby... Like catchin' snowflakes, she's gone before I got it figured out"

I hope that if I ever stop being curious about birth I have the decency and self-awareness to stop participating.

It is ignorant and cruel to turn birth outcomes into some kind of moral and personal failing. To be frank, it's being used to sell you something. Membership to a club that, if you don't meet the criteria, wants you to see it as something being intrinsically wrong with you.

That's quite convenient, and those who espouse this phrase expect women to fade into the shadows if they don't fit the narrative. As a doula, I often end up being sought out by the women in the shadows.

If somebody chooses to abuse us while we are heavily pregnant or in the birth room, we are not weak for our body's freeze or fawn response. If we truly need help, if in another time we and/or our baby would have died, it is not because we just aren't radical enough. It is not your fault.

And it's just not true. I had the most ecstatic freebirth while tolerating the most awful abuse in my personal life. I was NOT birthing how I lived, in misery and despair, but the birth was a taste of bliss that plunged me even deeper into hell, and gradually, painfully, out again.

Brigid's Eve

They say on Brigid's eve

The reeds must be gathered from the water's edge

By a woman with a covered head.

They used to say about the great mother goddess

That the one who saw her unveiled

Would go mad with the power of it.

Ireland gave me-

Wild hair, pale skin, the rosary

And stomach issues.

My great grandmother

Walks the streets of Canton with a brown paper bag of raspberry leaves, a headscarf tied under her chin

And a baby in her womb, veiled from the world.

The art of concealment is old magic

As priestesses in the temple and old women well know.

My great grandfather was, as they say, a swine

But knew the names of every plant and tree in the forest

He sailed over the world and still said the most beautiful women were in Wales

Where their skin glowed with rainfall and misty mountains.

The women could not sail away to find out for themselves so they did what women do;

Became keepers of the hearth fires

Like their mothers before them

Like the ancient priestesses of Bride.

They say she was midwife at the birth of Christ

And that she wove the reed cross to make her father swap the old faith for the new

But what if she was saying-

This is how women keep the world turning, turning, turning, renewing, protecting, ever new.

For after all, the first cross

Is cloaked in the womb.