TRANSITION

He walked up to me in the open waiting room in his lab coat. He looked both apprehensive and relieved to have found me before I left. I could see that he was a man who usually kept to himself behind the glass screen peeping through glass microscopes.

“He will help you”, he said to me. “He helps the animals in the wilderness.. It will all go well.” On the day I had insisted someone else, other than the obviously flustered attendant on duty draw my blood, he had been kind. He had treated me as if he knew, as if he knew that I had come in a piñata of emotions. But he didn’t know. I nodded – because I saw how much it had taken for him to tell me. “Oh, I’m coming back. It’s not yet time,” I mumbled.

…

He is being reintroduced to me. They all are. He doesn’t know who I am ever since he heard the news. His intention, of course was good, very good, just like me- too good, too cowardly, too sensitive, too serious, too introverted. This morning, he does not know where to begin. His hesitation and awkwardness as he walks towards me lying in the hospital bed, catching my eye in a hiccup of a glance, feigning rejection because the nurse told them that I, we, needed at least fours before outside contact. One of us has just arrived and the other has just transitioned through a death and resurrection.

Transition was like being between four walls of pain with no where to turn. I tugged, pulled, hit. Then, I reached out to the one place in my memory which had saved me once, the shores of the Atlantic below Table Mountain.

“Do you know where you are? Do you know where you are?” the nurse had asked me frantically as she searched my eyes and shook me gently.

I stood in the sand and looked at the water, the ice cold blue water flowing endlessly and waited for relief but it was all a blurry picture. I went inward, to a place of nothingness; but every time I thought I would hide and get lost, the pain shook me back to life. There was nothing left. Screaming is for shallower pains.

I had just gazed at her, unblinking. I commanded my hijacked accomplice to give me the only physical pain relief I could get that I had managed to get free off YouTube. I commanded my body to make the last maneouvres I could. It was cold. The hypnobirthing instructor had advised not to have cold feet and I had wondered when, in our weather I would ever have cold feet. These days every time my feet get cold I remember that cold Monday morning. Only the earth knows what it feels like, tectonic movements creating fault lines in my hips, the bones in my back, once again, realigning.

9 hours later, the one who had shifted high and low, side to side, slurping, scratching, shoving his foot or hand against my ribs throughout the night started pushing out. On Åsa Holsteins’ podcast where the clear image of my birth’s soul had first taken form, they had said it sounded like an animal. For me, it sounded like a bellow. I had known that with every push, the mountain of emotion that had piled up inside of me would come out and nothing else would matter.

He was slapped onto my chest – bloody and corded to me; immediately he looked up and smiled. I knew then what I had found out before, when had been on a quiet descent to the bottom. Alone with a newborn in a chair, sore breasts, staring ahead at nothing in particular, I had momentarily looked down. His brother had stopped feeding, tilted his face towards me and smiled. It was a real smile, an intentional smile, just like this one. There was a real person in there, not just a baby; had known from then on, that I would be okay.

3cm dilated and the pain had started setting up its tools, my heart dared someone to bind me up. I wanted someone to try and hold me down, someone to try and hold me back. I just wanted one more person to tell me who to be, to tell me who I was and what I could not do. It has never been clearer to me, exactly what I wanted or rather what I did not want, more than it had those past nine months. I had never been more certain of exactly what I did not want as I did that night. Only once before, only that time, for another life decision. I just needed a tap on the shoulder. I was ready for a fight. I had been preparing for this for three years.

He hadn’t seen me for who I was, only for who he is- his anti thesis. A life of pleasing had left me watered down and contained- but this, this force within me… It begged to come out, draped itself over me and overwhelmed me. I knew then, that it would not come out through a surgical knife under fluorescent tubes. It would come out like an avalanche.

…

“Do you remember that moment when I looked at you and you believed me?”

“I do.”

When I had mouthed, over the doctor’s reprimand and wagging finger, over the nurse’s crossed arms and armored pose. “Help me. Don’t let me go through this nightmare again.“

It was all procedure. I had to do it or else.

“What are these?” I asked as the nurse shoved a number of papers in my face. I read it. She had not thought I would. My years of reading documents had come in handy. It was a consent to all necessary procedures.

“If you refuse to sign this, then you have to sign that you have refused to listen to medical advice and if anything happens to your baby…”

In the file, the doctor had listed a number of cautions and explanations that he had supposedly taken us through before our stubborn refusal.

“Nothing will happen,” I cut in as I signed the declaration of refusal to accept. It was 3:00 a.m. on the morning of my baby’s delivery and I was racing out of the specialist women’s hospital touted for its life saving procedures not sure of where we were going to next. I was only sure of one thing, that I have been sure of a few things in my life, and that nobody was going to hold me down again, not again and not this time.

…jasmine oil, spinning babies, sarah devall, bridget teyler, åsa holstein, forward leaning inversions, side lying release, hypnobirthing by anja, dr. anne akello, hip dips, acupressure massages in the night, crying out in despair- asking for a sign- meet me half way, meet me half way, a small cloud in the sky- give me a sign- visions of faith...

you will not labour in vain.