this narrative describes a healing experience i had during a session using Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapeutic modality engaging the various parts of my being who are in relationship with one another. i was processing trauma surrounding the birth of my first child, which i realized in my current pregnancy was still very present in my body. by getting to know the parts of me who are present in this dynamic, i was able to help them process and release their pain and the ways they learned to protect me.
as I settle into my body, i notice that my head becomes heavy, like a rock that is pressing into the earth. from it young roots develop, twisting and turning downward into the dark soil. I sit with them and listen, they say to me ‘we are connecting you to the earth, there is grounding available to you here’.
As I continue to witness the labor of these fresh green roots, a voice emerges and says ‘you are making this part of the journey so big. It is big in that it is a beginning, a crucial transition, but it’s also only a very small part of the entire journey.’ I ask her who she is, and although she doesn’t take shape I feel an expansive generational knowing of birthing and parental wisdom stretch from beyond my left shoulder.
She, this guide, tells me ‘we are no one part of us, we are no one thing that happens to us even in crucial moments. There is no one event, occurrence, feeling, action that can change or define the entire arch of our stories.’ At this moment I notice opening in my heart and feel baby kicking and moving around. With my breath, forming a circle with my lips, I send this wisdom deep within to baby and through the air and trees as a soft wind to find Clark, my older child, at school on this Thursday. In this wind is a promise to witness any implicit trauma Clark carries from his birth narrative, should it ever alert him to presence in his own body.
‘As we know this to be true now’, i say, ‘what becomes available to us with this knowing?’ I hear back that we are able to surrender, not try to be everything, and invite in those who can provide us with a wave of support and protection. I hear from my heart, ‘this is already available, it is already happening’.
With this sense of settling in my body, I invite parts of me who are not at peace to come forward if they feel safe in doing so. A girl, much younger than the version of me who gave birth to Clark, came forward. I see her as a young teenager, she’s sitting in a sterile conference room with beaming fluorescent overhead lights. She is collapsed into a plastic chair, head down, arms crossed over her head and she is sobbing. I ask her if it’s okay for me to sit beside her, she consents, and when I sit she puts her head in my lap and I just hold her for awhile.
I ask her if there’s anything she’d like for me to know, and she says ‘I tried so hard, but was not able to keep Clark safe. I was not able to keep the medical system from medicalizing his birth, and he was taken away from us and it’s all my fault’. As I hold her, I ask her what might happen if she didn’t hold this guilt and she says ‘then we would have been out of control and at the mercy of the oppressive systems’.
‘How does it feel to have tried to control the process of Clark’s birth?’
‘Exhausting, and I failed anyway.’
I hold her, and notice an increasing restlessness in her, she is shifting and I intuit that she may be interested in leaving this glass encircled, sterile environment. She is ready to leave this imprisionment of shame, control, perceived failure of Clark when she could not win against the immense and oppressive system. I ask her, ‘do you want to leave?’ she nods, puts her arm around my shoulder, and I pick her up, cradling her like a baby in my arms and carry her out of the conference room, down the halls of the hospital, and out the front door.
‘Is there anything you want to release so that you do not carry the control and responsibility of Clark’s birth, or this new baby’s even?’ She opens her mouth and glass shards emerge, the glass of the NICU incubator that kept Clark’s body unnecessarily from us for days. She release the glass windows of the cold hospital windows, she expelled the prison of medicalized birth born of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
With spaciousness now, she decided to replace the shards of glass with pinches of stars, dark matter, grass, dirt. With it she embodied this earth and the universe, an expansive interconnectedness of support and surrender.
In being released from her role of trying to fight all the systems, she was able to surrender to all the support that is available to her in this next birth. ‘We didn’t fail,’ she now says, ‘we just belong out here with the stars and the earth, not behind glass and under fluorescent lights’.
A bit later, listening to a song gifted to me by my mentor, this teenager showed my internal system a little girl, under three years old, at the birth of her brother. As the story goes, as her brother remained unnecessarily in the NICU (very same one as Clark thirty years earlier) this little girl spoke firmly into the room of adults that ‘the baby should be with the mommy’.
the teenager tried to keep her safe by taking on the burden of fighting an impossible fight of medicalization of birth, but now she is free to exist amongst the stars and within the warmth of surrender to the of support that shows up when birthing happens. The three year old, a young voice who delivers the ancestral knowing that babies belong with their parent(s), screams her truth out into a system, my system, who is truly witnessing her.