Mistakes were made
Ignoring the signs and eschewing Western doctors for midwives was probably not the best idea in my case being that I was 35, fat, didn't exercise regularly and had PCOS. Of course, none of this was clear to me until years later - after the pain of a difficult birth, a baby in the NICU and that ultimate insult, the lack of breast milk. Nothing could have prepared me for that. Not in my wildest dreams.
It's not that I grew up a hippie. Not like on a commune. That was my little brothers, after I left my mom's home. It's not that we went to traditional healers instead of doctors, or that my mother birthed any of us on her own hearth. It's not that my life was a made-up TV version of free love and wild children. The love didn't seem to be all that free, the children were sometimes wild and happy and sometimes in trouble and often scared. Yes, we wore capes made out of cut up sheets and Indian tapestries. Yes, our friends had a huge Great Dane in their jam-packed house (stuff, people, drums, pots, beans, ganja). Yes, the men tended toward Afros or long hair and the women smelled like patchouli.
But it wasn't the way they show it in the movies -stupid, mindless people who have given it all up to live, love, fuck and be free. Our mothers struggled, raised kids, some went to school, some worked at jobs. Me and my mom cleaned a house once a week in the summer. They had a great surname and a perfectly neat house. Nothing really needed cleaning which made it all the more fun. I got to wash the windows.
Mom and I did yoga together with the Golden Temple yogurt yogis in their brilliant white turbans and simple cotton clothes. I hated it. Too easy to get contorted into a painful position while the adult women looked on in envy, wishing themselves to be young again. Me and mom also did an Om group, that was more fun - making the sound reverberate like a magnetic force, humming tones, zapping, high pitched electrical charges.
But summers always came to an end. My brother and I always had to get back on the train and leave to go south, one reality melting into another as the miles went by. Once we hit Dunsmuir, it was all over. One world gone, another begun. From warmth to utter coldness. From the smells of hot outdoor festivals held on dirt roads covered with hay and teeming with barely clad people to the austerity of everything in its place in an upscale bedroom community.
Hard times and longing are what make me appreciate those relics of my childhood now. I appreciate them for what they were then and for what they gave me. But sometimes I try, based on a little nostalgia, a little fear, a lot of fantasy, to be something I'm not. It was like that with the birth. I don't know how I thought I would pull it off. It's not like I got together with goddessy women before hand and did a belly cast. It's not that being a woman with earth mother intentions could have prepared me for that terrible, ripping pain at the small of my back. Suffering is not noble. Pain doesn't come naturally. And neither did my baby.
I should have known it would be so. I spent my young life between worlds, not fully in them.
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