On March 6, 2011 at 8:50pm, a miracle – Orion – was born into this life. He was born at home, into the waiting arms of a loving midwife and before the eyes of his family. His first breathe was a lusty wail, rich and whole like his ageless soul. His first sight, his mother’s face. And his first night spent in her arms.
Moments after his birth, Diva Baby rests peacefully on his mother's breast.
* * *
Contractions. Labor pains. Rushes. The name I gave them in my head didn’t affect the sensations I felt.
They were like when you have a dream, and you find yourself suddenly in a place you’ve never been – you know you don’t want to be there, but you don’t have the choice. And in this dreamscape, you’re falling into blackness… into blackness, out of blackness, plummeting down. And then someone switches on a light – and you can breathe again.
Only, this time – it’s no dreamscape. You’re wide awake. And you know that switching on a light isn’t going to take you out of the experience.
I remember my Body trying to stop them, countless times, pleading with my Mind to let us both take a breather. It was a fierce struggle. But my Mind kept winning.
“No, no stopping. We have to go deeper. We can’t stop. He’s coming, and we’ve waited so long. Go deeper in, breathe deeper in, let yourself go there and stay there. We can rest when he’s out.”
So I stood, naked in the shower under a rush stream of steamy water, leaning my right side against the shower wall and pressing both hands against the door, affirming my Mind’s desire out loud in a deep, low, drawn out breathe with each plummeting wave of darkness: “Ooooo-pen…. ooooo-pen…. OOOO-PEN!”
Each time I commanded my Body to open, I could feel, ever so slightly, the internal response in my cervix and the steady downward movement of my baby. This was happening – and it was happening fast.
My Body responded beautifully, the struggle giving way to the realization that these rolling waves of pain were so much more than just physical sensation. They were many lifetimes of wisdom colliding with one lifetime’s miracle and choice. They were doorways flying open to a new chapter of my story. They were hope, love, abundance realized and the power of affirmations in evidence.
My son was coming, and my son was coming tonight.
* * *
Orion’s birth story begins many years ago, when I was a 15 year-old girl growing up in a tight-knit religious community in the boondocks of the Southwestern USA. I was a dreamer, literally and figuratively. At an early age I started having vivid and terrifying dreams of people in my life, once dreaming that a friend’s father had died – only to have the scene replayed before my eyes three months later, with the colors and sounds and people from my dream all repeated in horrifying real-time.
But not all my dreams were nightmares. The first time I dreamed of my Son, it was like I’d finally discovered Heaven.
He was beautiful – dark curls and wide blue eyes, sometimes an infant, sometimes a boy, sometimes a man. Wise and serious but full of vivacity, too. The vagueness of who he was and where he came from made him even more tantalizing to my imaginative soul. I wanted so badly to meet him, to hold him, and to run through Life with him at my side.
There was only one thing I knew for certain from those dreams: my Son was definitely real, and he would come to into my life in my 25th year.
* * *
39 weeks pregnant...
Pregnancy hadn’t felt easy for me.
Psychologically, I put myself through the wringer, questioning all my instincts and sapping my intuitive powers until I no longer believed I had any intuition left. My team of Midwives often encouraged me to relax, let go, and to remember… even as I approached full term and was pleading with God and the Universe to just get the kid OUT of me… that I was still the wise young woman who had come into their office several months before with a dream and a mission. But as the pregnancy went on, I lost faith in myself and my innate womanly wisdom more and more.
I was working long hours in a job that I loved – great for my savings account, but hard on my Body. Yet, I continued – motivated by a need to pay the bills associated with my son’s delivery as much as by my own driven personality to excel and over-excel at every task.
I wasn’t eating the diet I had so wanted to maintain for the entire pregnancy – my blissed out raw vegan diet! My Body had rejected most of my former favorite raw vegan foods early in the second trimester and my world felt increasingly chaotic without the structure of my favorite foodie lifestyle.
Physically, it wasn’t a picnic. For the first six months, I couldn’t seem to gain any weight and had to work hard to “look pregnant”. I certainly FELT pregnant, though! I had back pain, daily migraines, hemorrhoids, and 24/7 morning sickness. Then, in the last month, I was suddenly gaining so much weight that the Midwives suggested I revise my diet (again). I began to feel fat and critical of myself, which of course only led to me gaining MORE weight and having MORE unpleasant symptoms! (How quickly I had forgotten the powerful Law of Attraction in my worn out state of being…)
And when the “spastic uterus” - excessive and often painful contractions – struck in January, over two months before my son was due, I really threw my hands in the air! Enough already, Body! First, you were making me miserable – and now you were just downright PAINFUL!
In fact, I pretty much felt like I wasn’t doing ANYTHING “right”. I was always astonished when people told me I looked amazing and healthy, because I felt like crap.
When my Boss lovingly evicted me from my job and sent me home on Maternity Leave a couple weeks before my Son was due, I finally took the time for the first time in several months to accept that I was pregnant… and this was it. The child I had for many years dreamt about, loved and wanted in my life… was finally on his way – and it wouldn’t be long!
And with that sense of acceptance, I was able to quickly and gently Piece my Peace back together. I began to relax, take long walks with my dogs, and to finally read chapters of the home birth classic, Ina May’s Guide to Child Birth. These last two weeks were the best time of my pregnancy – and that book was the best thing I could have read in preparation for what was ahead. As I began to breathe more deeply, my Body and my Mind reunited as a team and I settled into a rhythm of resting, waiting, and envisioning the health and wholeness of my unborn Son.
My back pain diminished, my weight gain stopped and I felt refreshed about life and health and my son’s arrival.
I was finally ready.
* * *
Late in the evening of March 5, I was emailing back and forth with an old raw vegan friend. Quite randomly (do you believe in random?), we fell into discussing my son’s chosen name and my own design to change my birth name, as well. When I gave her our new names, she did a numerological reading on them both. Ecstatic with what she discovered, she emailed me back immediately:
My son’s first and last names were both nines! I had already determined NOT to give him a middle name and she affirmed the wisdom on that choice.
“It is RARE to find this quality in a name,” she said. “Very balanced name. A path of completion…”
Everything she told me in the reading, based entirely on her own intuition and guides, was powerful but simple confirmation of what I had already known, dreamed about, and even experienced through the pregnancy. Particularly as regarded his psychic abilities.
As early as my first trimester, I was having strangers and friends alike come up and want to “meet” my son because they felt a powerful draw to him. On multiple occasions, people experiencing spiritual troubles came to me seeking guidance and left saying they felt like my unborn son had been giving them protection and healing… from the womb!
After the reading, I was so excited I could hardly settle myself down to accept her long-distance Reiki treatment for me and my son that night. But I did eventually breathe into the Reiki and fall asleep, grateful and excited and wondering what lay ahead.
* * *
The morning after those readings, at 6:40am, my water broke. I pranced around my home like a happy child for several hours, excited that the day had come, excited that it was March 6 – a Sunday – and the New Moon!
When the Midwives arrived around 4pm, I was already dilated to 4 centimeters. Between a particularly breathtaking set of contractions, I told them that my son would arrive by 9pm. Diva Daddy and Grandma shook their heads and the Midwives weren’t sure if I was crazy or not, expecting such a short delivery with my first child!
But I knew my son HAD to come by 9pm on March 6th. It was his gift to me, in recognition of the reading my friend had given me the night before: you see, my own new chosen name was a 3-6-9, a powerful combination in numerology to go with my powerful chart.
As the contractions intensified and my Body responded more and more eagerly to my loud spoken affirmations, the head Midwife finally looked at me and agreed. My son and I weren’t waiting another day! He would be a 3-6-9 baby, indeed.
At 8pm, exhausted from the pain and strain of the contractions and feeling weak but ready, I reached full dilation. The Midwives helped me climb out of the shower, where I had been bellowing “OOO-PEN!” loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear, and I found a comfortable position on the bed.
It had all happened so quickly (yes, I even felt that way while in the middle of it!) that we hadn’t had time to fill up the inflatable children’s pool for a water birth. With one Midwife pinning my right leg back and Diva Daddy supporting my left leg, I settled into the mighty effort of bringing my son out into the world at last, one deep breathe and forceful push at a time.
In all the birth stories I had read, women were continually saying that pushing felt much better than contractions. But what they forgot to mention was that pushing and contractions came TOGETHER… oh God, the pain was intense! At times I could feel my eyes bulging from my skull and it felt like the pressure in my lower regions was traveling up to my chest to choke the blood right out of my heart.
The Midwives repeatedly directed my focus out of the waves of pain and into the process of the birth, breathing with me, smiling for me, letting me rest, and then cheering me on through the next contraction, the next two pushes. My Body felt weaker every minute and for a brief panicked second I wasn’t sure I could do this after all, especially as one Midwife rubbed oil into my perineum and said just loud enough for me to hear, “We have to get this bigger or… I don’t know!”
But then my son’s head crowned. Diva Daddy was gleeful – he could see his son! Quickly, I reached down… and miraculously, I could feel a tuft of soft newborn hair. I curled my finger in my son’s soft hair – and everything else fell away in that moment. Nothing mattered but getting him out – nothing was more important than holding him – and I didn’t CARE anymore how badly it hurt doing it.
At 8:50pm, as I was still shouting, “My Body opens with ease to get my son OUT!”, my Body did just that, and with a holler they could hear in the next county – my son was born!
In a split second, a single breath, Life as I knew it was changed – for the better – forever. With the birth of my son, I too was reborn.
With the wholebodied, wholehearted honesty of infanthood, Diva Baby embraces his world...
