My baby, like his brother and sister, was born at home in the dining room. We had many people in the house on the afternoon of his birth – grandmothers, friends, midwives, etc. – but everyone spoke in hushed tones. Mom said it was like being in a library.
A few hours after the birth, my new son and I went upstairs to my bedroom where we stayed there in bed for a whole week. For the first several days, there wasn’t a clock in the room. I spent my time staring into the round face of this new person who made eye contact with me often and smiled. I watched the rectangles of sunlight moving across the floor and the bed. At night, when I was often awake, the moonlight spilled over us, and I lay staring up at the stars. I looked out at the tops of the maples that line the western edge of the property and watched them lose their leaves over the course of that week. The power of the land and the movements of light and wind were like a new womb that held and comforted both me and my son.
Each time after I have given birth, I have felt almost like a baby myself. The world is a foreign, daunting place that has to be re-explored. Written language or logical conversation doesn’t make sense to me. I live in some special kind of warm light. This was a difficult situation during my first two births because I felt I had to act competent and strong as soon as I possibly could, and so I was constantly fighting with myself. After this birth, my husband and mother in law doted on me, bringing me water and food and speaking quietly. The children visited reverently. In this quiet place, I didn’t have to pretend to be experiencing anything except what I was, and I was able to open fully to the Light.
After that first week, I ventured downstairs a little bit but mostly stayed cocooned upstairs with the baby. When I could read again, I kept the Fedco tree catalogue by my bed and spent hours re-reading several descriptions of rose bushes. Reading about those roses was one of my baby steps as I eased gently into family life again, bursting into tears when I pushed too fast.
Now almost a month and a half has passed, and I feel strong again, but I am carrying that sensation of lying in my bed with my baby with the wind and the sun moving past the windows. Remembering it fills me again with Light and stills my thoughts. I am reminded of the steadfastness of God. I try to slip into that place when I pray silently, and I try to pray often.
After staying at home for five and a half months because of a difficult pregnancy and then this birth, I am starting to go out into the world again. Someone at Meeting said last week that I must be so relieved to be done with bed rest. This small talk kind of floored me, and she repeated herself as I sat there with a blank look on my face. Finally, I answered awkwardly that it was OK. In truth, I am not relieved or disappointed to be done with this time of stillness. It's impossible to have an opinion about it because I am still living under a sense of awe. Something within me shifted during this time, but I don’t understand yet what it is.
