I birthed my daughter 8 years ago, just a few days before the summer solstice, when the moon was waxing in the sky, building toward the full strawberry moon. My labor was not long and I birthed my baby quickly but I was torn wide open. I tore physically but I was also opened mentally and emotionally in a way I didn't know was possible. My initiation into motherhood had altered me forever. In those moments I felt cracked open, and with that opening, a powerful realization- that the church, the culture, the school system, had tried to hide me from myself. They knew just how to destroy, to stomp out, to kill all that was within me that wanted to be wild, to bleed, to remember. They knew because they had been doing it for thousands of years to women just like me. They disempowered me and cultivated fear around all the things that could lead me astray. The stories of Eve, blood, and birth as punishment, were fed to me over and over and over.
But when I was pregnant I became instinctual and hungry with an intense urge for something different. I wanted to give birth to my baby at home in water. That route was not available to me, in that we lived in a studio apartment at the time. But the hospital had water births and midwives available. It would have to do. I was fortunate, not all hospitals had those options. I tried to probe the women in my life for real knowledge of birth. Only fear-mongering and stories of our inherited sin were gifted to me. But when it was my turn to birth another woman into my matriarchal line, I felt the oppressive hold break. My daughter was born from a place of power, not punishment, and all of the oppression I had carried, the guilt, religious control, and internalized misogyny was drained away with the crimson waters.
Everything I had internalized as a woman was woven into this invisible yet heavy patchwork cloak. This cloak had been placed around my shoulders as my inheritance. With each wounding, a grandmother stitched a new patch, the warnings of their sin to be passed down with the birthing of a new daughter. The thread was their own mitochondria. The fabric was fused with milk and blood, reminders of the ancient rights of women long gone. They stitched to help the next generation survive: here are the rules. This cloak hung heavy on my back while my new daughter's dark eyes looked up into my own. I had long ago come to understand that the myth of Eve was constructed, but only now did I understand why. A woman's ability to bleed and birth holds power. And with that realization, I set myself free from the cloak. I thanked the women of my lineage for birthing, bleeding, and growing, I recognized their pains and triumphs and my own too. But this cloak was not mine. It should never have been theirs and I would do everything in my power to keep it from touching the small dimpled shoulders of this new being. I had faced death and rebirth. In the act of birth I was wild, I bled and I remembered. I now held the power of the truth. It was brought forth in pain and pleasure, in blood and milk. These things no longer sin, they have become my savior.
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