GIVING BIRTH TO DEATH
Today I am sharing a personal story in the spirit of weaving you closer into my life and artistic process, as I create my new film about womanhood, motherhood and erotic liberation, called “Intimate Revolutions.”
The following is a story of my recent miscarriage.
It’s a rainy Friday night, and just the day before, with much nerves and excitement, I launched a crowdfunding campaign for my new documentary film.
We are about to sit down for dinner and I go to the bathroom.
Blood.
I am stunned.
I am almost 7 weeks into this new pregnancy.
We were already arranging our lives according to the due date, making plans.
The next morning, more blood.
At 10 am, an ultrasound. “There is a clear heartbeat here,” the OB says.
My husband is filming the ultrasound monitor as the doctor scans my gel-covered belly on the exam table. Along with our daughter, we are all straining to see the tiny heartbeat flicker on the screen.
My womb is cramping. “This won’t mean that you won’t have a miscarriage, but for now everything looks perfect” she adds.
By evening, after putting our daughter to bed, I want to sleep, simultaneously navigating early pregnancy exhaustion and intensifying cramps.
Then, more blood.
We look at each other with sad eyes and knowing looks. One of us will have to be up at 6:30 with Olivia, so we hold each other for a while in silence and I send him off to bed.
And so for the next 7 hours, I am up and down, bleeding, and writhing in searing labor pains. The rain is not letting up, coming down against the windows now, just as it had when I labored with Olivia, almost 5 years ago.
Here I am, returning to this portal, the door that opens between life and death, and I, a mere vessel.
I had waffled on the decision to get pregnant for the last year and a half.
We had always talked about having two children, and it was just never the right time.
We were full with Olivia, community, working part time on a feature length doc about Tamera, the free love community in Portugal….
Then there was a pandemic, we were working on our relationship…
After I weaned at 2 ½ years old. When she was 3, with my husband’s blessing, I started a beautiful new lovership with an old friend.
I wanted to feel my own body again, discover my eros anew, and my devotion to career and art grew.
And still, persisting was this longing within me to carry life again.
How to do it all?
10 days left to support my film campaign about motherhood, womanhood, and erotic liberation.
(October Sukkot festival, during a fertility and water ritual to call in the rains)
Then, this Fall, we finally felt the yes.
It was October and the Jewish holiday of Sukkot was nearing. We felt the blessing of the timing being around this harvest festival — a time to call in the rains. On the same weekend of the conception, Hamas attacked Israel.
In the weeks following the attack, as Israel started to bomb Gaza like never before, new life took hold in my womb, and while it felt miraculous, I was simultaneously and slowly turning into imaginal goop, facing my own dissolution and reconstruction with the influx of hormones. I was becoming ever more porous to the violence streaming in through my screens.
Still, I did not turn them off.
I felt a committed solidarity to remain a witness to the unfolding, to stay with the visuals, to remain active, calling my representatives, calling for cease-fire, and to be informed by following citizen journalists on the ground in Gaza.
As The Story Doula says, “pain is mycelial.”
My womb was pulsing with pain and grief, feeling the sisters in Palestine, crying for their loss. For the madness of their reality — no water, food, shelter. Videos of mothers and fathers holding children and babies in body bags had me dropping to my knees, feeling a mother’s pain.
We are not designed to hold or sense make of such madness. As mothers, we love our children so deeply, so intensely, we would likely give our lives for them. I can not and could not imagine how a woman experiencing this kind of loss could go on with her life.
And yet, she must.
(Photo by citizen journalist Motaz Azaiza in Palestine)
That rainy Saturday night as I was laying there in the night, laboring death and experiencing this loss, I felt this mycelial connection, aware of my warm and safe home, and shedding tears not just for my baby, but for all the women who are birthing and miscarrying in far graver conditions than I. For those who cannot find peace, shelter, sanitation. For those who cannot be held and comforted through this pain.
While the decision to finally get pregnant was joyful and full of possibility, the pregnancy quickly and early on felt the opposite. It wasn’t just the news. I noticed a negativity took over me. A bleak outlook on my marriage and on the future of this planet began to shroud my psyche. Everything felt wrong.
What world am I birthing a child into? Who is this being that is bringing up so much pessimism in me? What insanity is going on in this planet? How can I one day explain the monstrosity and magnitude of human destruction to my children?
I knew for sure, I could not be idle while it all went down.
I couldn’t turn off the media and I couldn’t turn away. Yet, I felt powerless with my phone calls, made from my safe neighborhood and home, to help. And as I thought of all the souls of children leaving bodies in Gaza, and other warring places in the world, I wondered, what soul is coming to me now, in this time of amplified war and destruction?
And who will I become as a result of carrying them in my womb?
Whenever there is loss, it calls on immense resource to sense-make, and make peace with it.
It’s not lost on me that the miscarriage happened approximately during the time that the cease-fire was called.
The day after the miscarriage, it was like a calm after the storm. I experienced a feeling of aloneness I hadn’t quite felt before. Even with my family nearby, there was a slight sense that it was as if I had begun a journey on a train, and got off before I reached my destination, realizing I was in an unmarked location, bags in hand, not a soul in sight.
The most shocking thing I felt, was relief.
I had been on a rollercoaster ride that looked thrilling from the ground, but once on it, I wanted off.
I felt some guilt and shame in admitting that. And yet, I have a sense I am not alone.
Here I am, launching a new creative project into the world, a film about motherhood, womanhood and erotic liberation, that requires me to hone my voice and message about motherhood, womanhood and erotic liberation. A dream and a vision that requires my time. My daughter is in kindergarten. I LOVE being a mom, but could I really go to baby-land all over again? Could I afford it, would I be present enough? Would the world be better for it?
What is mine to do?
Every day, I toggle between work versus family.
Dharma versus obligation.
Commitment versus freedom.
It’s all too binary.
Waiting, waiting for “the right moment.”
The reality is that life and the natural order of things is far less linear, and much more complex and mysterious than this dominant western overculture wants us to believe.
And beyond relief, there is grief, because I did long for another babe, despite my creative pursuits. In fact, the idea has not leave me alone for the last many years.
Paradox.
All the input, and all the voices are too much to bear, and, I want to be able to hold it all.
While I lean into trust, another voice whimpers, and asks, “but why didn’t it work for me?”
1 in 3 women experience a miscarriage, yet it’s not commonly talked about.
I ask myself why?
Is it the potential connection to ‘failure’ that relegates it to the category of a shameful taboo?
Is it that it’s too personal, and too private?
Too… what?
Articulating this kind of thing inside of a grief portal is tender, and difficult, yet here I am doing it because grief is not meant to endure alone. The mystery of who comes to this Earth and who goes, and at what time, is difficult to sense-make.
In the days after the miscarriage, a dear friend passed on some wisdom from a teacher indigenous to Peru. He said that in his cosmology, some souls need to gestate for a short time in the womb in order to uplevel their soul contract — that just some time in the womb is enough of a touchpoint of incarnation before they move on.
And yet, there is a wisdom of the body that ends the life of a fetus that may be genetically malformed. Our bodies are so intelligent, and give us signals all the time. If only we are empowered to listen, and follow that wisdom, and lived within medical systems that followed our body’s wisdoms, rather that imposed their doctrines and dogmas on top of us.
And what a blessing that my pregnancy tissues passed on their own. Many women who lose a pregnancy, like my sister who lives in Poland did, need to have a procedure done called a DNC, which manually removes the pregnancy tissue when it does not pass on its own.
Thankfully, she had this done before abortion was made illegal in Poland (my country of origin) just two year ago. Had it been since, her own life would have been threatened, perhaps even lost, as some others have been as a result of this ban.
I am angered by the ways that institutions like government control women’s bodies, for example, via reproductive rights, while capitalism and industry fetishize maidenhood and commodify sex.
{10 DAYS LEFT to support my NEW FILM about all these topics}
(Above: Images of protests on the Abortion Ban in Poland. Some people carry signs of a woman who died of unnecessary pregnancy complications.)
Resting now, on the other side of the loss, as I continue to bleed, slowly I am letting my body heal, and I meditate on The Mother.
I am talking about Mother both as an archetype, and as physical life-bearer.
Mother, at first, is both a creator and destroyer.
But perhaps beyond that, Mother is an usher, a vessel, a steward.
The maiden who moves into mother places the focus beyond herself.
She opens her arms and deepens her capacity to hold more.
A mother who births another life is the one who touches that doorway of life and death, as another walks through it.
Mother is one who creates, and lets go.
Mother is not meant to keep what she births, but aims to create environments in which that creation can reach its potential.
I write this now on the eve of my daughter’s 5th birthday, and with each day, I am in awe of who she is becoming. I am so grateful she has come to me.
And, I grieve the loss of a future that could have been. And I write this, as I gestate art, which is meant to be birthed as well, in service.
And as I grieve, and integrate, I feel connected to every woman who has lost a pregnancy.
If this is you, I connect, from aching womb to heart to womb.
And the cycle begins again, clearing the channel to make way for what is coming through.
Every ending, a new beginning.
10 days left to support my film campaign about motherhood, womanhood, and erotic liberation.
THANK YOU FOR READING,
Julia