Birth, today I write into your bliss.

Birth, so lovely, so appealing to many. What do we feel when we look at her, hear from her?
There is the outer beauty of birth, witnessing her life or watching the pictures or video's we can look at.

Also there is the inner beauty of birth. I found out that I can write again and again about one birth experience and each time find back other layers of the experience. I have written about the birth in German first, than I wrote the blog 'birth does not have to be quiet', picturing my inner criticizer as an uninvited guest and today I wanted to write down the 'factums' of the birth in English and I ended up in the forest of our love, experiencing the bliss and strength of enabling our love to turn into a boy on earth..

For women who believe they had a traumatizing birth are at least a birth they don't like to look back at I want to give the advice: write. Write one day and it may hurt. Write another day and it may hurt but it might also recall your thankfulness. Write another time and you could rediscover the moments you felt strong. Write once more and you can end up in bliss. 

In August the first River Of Milk issue will be released online! Once section of the e-zine is all about birth-quotes. I would feel very honored if you would want to share your writings about birth with me. I can read them and be there for you as a Doula, if anything about your experience is not processed or you can't find the healing space through writing, I am here to guide you there. I may ask you to share parts of these writings in the next e-zine, but if you want to share them with me only this is worth just as much to me! I simply notice that in many written birth-stories there are some treasures of poetic sentences to find. This kind of poetry is full of grace, because the writers have generally not tried at all to write as poetic as possible. They write what they experienced: the poetry of life. laurademelzabosma@gmail is where you can contact me as the online Doula to help you process your birth-experience, or to simply celebrate your experience into written word, or, if you wish, as an editor to get your birth-prose as sharply written as possible. Also I can help to turn your birth-prose into poems or write a poem for you as an answer on your prose!

Here as a gift to you, another wave of written words about my youngest birth-experience:



Remi's birth took five hours all in all, from the first 'wave' until the birth in the pool. We actually woke our boy up in the night, around half past three to be born. I woke up and could not feel him. Because I was almost a week overdue I was a little bit worried: my other children both came before their 40 week due-dates. I woke up my Love and he also tried to contact our belly-boy. After a few minutes of silence we felt his precious kicks again and we were in bliss! Very consciously we enjoyed the last moments of my pregnancy, me in the papa's embrace and half an hour later I got the first 'wave'. Because of having false-alarm twice, I was still not sure if this was really it. But an hour or two later it was clear I was in serious labor, with intense and effective 'contractions', following each other up rapidly, with only two minutes of space in between. I deal with my waves for quite some time in the bath. My son Davin is delighted to find me there when he stands up and loves the task I suggest to him to pour water over my belly (too big to be under water from alone ;). At 7.15 the Doula arrives and shortly after the midwife Tanja comes in. I wander through the different rooms, changing position regularly. Man, this is hard work! But I feel so much love for my Love, kids and from my female enhancement. I remember many cuddles, strokes, massages, encouraging words. I remember how all encouraged me to give birth authentically.. 

When I almost start to feel blown away by the strength of the waves I decide to deal with them in the bed in the position I feel most safe in. I have to bounce up and down and howl loudly to go with them waves. When I get checked the first time I am nine centimeters dilated, which means 'almost there.' There is still time to fill the bath we decide. Our baby still needs to make the turn into the pelvis and we are both working and need some more time for this.
The best about being in the aquarium of birth is the way I can be close to Love who sits behind me. There it is safe and I need this rock, now that I feel so overwhelmed by it all. All are still with me until labor get's so intense that my daughter gets a bit frightened. The Doula goes into another room with her to make a puzzle. After a while I find my favorite position for the final stage of this birth. It is on all fours, a position I did not 'dare' with my other birth's because I generally tended to chose positions to slow down birth a bit, to be 'with it' in a way as gentle as possible. This time though I sense I need the power of on all fours to turn me into the embodiment of focus moving downwards, to help our baby enter the world. Tanja and Heath help me with this, I feel like I am giving birth to the impossible and they help me to say yes. While my body experiences a 'no', I turn my mind into 'yes' and howl it out so finally I become a big yes, all for this birth, all for this baby.



Then he is there.. I try to catch him but Tanja has to unwrap the cord first. Oh, it went so fast and now he's here! It is 9.27, he is a proper boy of the earth now, with his 53 cm. and 4320 grams.. These moments are so unique, like I drank a cocktail of disbelieve and thankfulness. How can one feel so wound and whole at the same time? He is so unique, so how I could never imagine him to be, so himself and I am a new me because my body has done everything to suit to him, to make him possible. His cries are of a new kind, a new voice and I experience myself as an answer on him. Again: I do what I do so differently than how I imagined it. My inner criticizer does speak, says that ecstasy is something different, that their would have been a better way but no.. There is no other way than the way it is, this is poetry and poetry is my bliss. The man I love so insanely is now a father. Everything in my life turned out different than I imagined already so often and this is my blessing. I slowly learn to see that 'I' don't know best. Life does.

Remi Sylvan Benjamin, my youngest love.. Your father helped me to expand my inner poetry-forest after big mouthfuls of it had been chopped down. Your first two names together mean savior of the forest. Like hope that came to blossom, you are a blessing for our future. I am your forest-mother, my last name says so in Dutch. Bosma, Bos-ma, Forest-ma, ma short for mama. Mama anew, I thank you.

Birth does not have to be quiet

Birth does not have to be quiet or pretty, or ecstatic, also it does not not have to be. Basically birth doesn't have to be like anything else than what it is like the moment it is happening...

Before the birth of my youngest son I must have seen at least a hundred different birth-video’s, many of them together with my five-year old daughter who wants to become a Doula herself one day.

There are births to watch in hospitals, like ‘One born every minute.’ They are hard to look at, when you are a bit of a birth-activist, wanting to spread consciousness about self-determined birthing. Even though each birth is primal and beautiful in its own unique way it can be heart-breaking to feel that a caesarean section could possibly have been prevented if only the woman would have felt more comforted, by a more consistent support of a midwife with enough time.   

I also watched the opposite type of birth video, wherein beautiful women lie between rose-petals in birthing-pools with fascinating, arty tattoos on their tiger stripe-free bodies. Some of them are quiet all through their births and some of them smile while their baby emerges. I have even seen two video’s with birthing women who explode into ecstatic laughter during the last stage of their child’s birth. In my subconscious these women turned into my birthing-hero’s and as it happens with hero’s, I wanted to be like them.   

I only found my inner heroines popping out of their cocoons, the morning our big baby-boy wanted to face the light. ‘I’ve seen them that can stay quiet!’ I yelled. ‘How do they do it? Why can’t I do it?’ It was maybe not the pain of the contractions, nor my own loudness that were hurting me the most, because this pain was indeed coming in waves and once the wave was gone it did not return, each one of them was new and left me when I had managed them. It was this ruthless inner criticizer that could not let me birth the only way I could without having a commentary to it. This voice caused me to feel a pain that had nothing to do with the physical pain and it remained during the first week after the birth. I had given birth at home, in the pool to a healthy 4320 gram love-baby without medication. I had a loving supporting-team around me and everything was just right but I had to go through moment’s feeling I had failed. Now, what is that about? Have I chosen a self-determined birth to create a peaceful birth-environment, what Leboyer calls 'Birth without violence', so that I can be this hard on myself? If a midwife in the hospital would tell a woman to be quiet, this could be classified as some form of emotional violence, hurting a woman in her integrity to expres herself in her own kind of way, right? It doesn't make sense either though to critique the inner criticizer. Ok, she is there and she can be a bit fierce, but all she wants is to be seen and accepted, the same way that the wordless roar wants to express itself. So I say to the bitch with the critique, it's all right, come here if you like and I put my  arms around you.

Here I am, exactly as I am, a mother but not a heroin. A mother with a tendency to perfectionism,
with one time impatience, another time patience towards herself to learn to let go.
I smile at my ego, my ‘wanting to be someone’, my preferences and disgusts.  
My tiredness I ask:
are you my thoughts? Why do you write this?
Why do you share it? What about the writing?

It’s a phoenix out of the ashes-thingie yo!
The ‘showing up anyway’ where Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in her wonderful Ted-speech.
Because you know what? I dreamed last night that Facebook introduced the ‘sick-button.’ I had written something on Facebook, maybe it was what I’ve just been writing and an old classmate from art-academy who is now a successful author had pushed the ‘sick-button’. It was a green face about to throw-up. I had no other likes, wow’s or comments, no angry’s,  no sad’s, just one sick. I woke up feeling like it had been a nightmare and I was aware once more about this wanting to do it all good of mine, this wanting to be someone who gets approval.

Here, I give this thoughts and feelings back to the flow, into the river of life. It is simply not up to me. Scream, like, wow, angry, sad, sick or don’t bother at all as much as you like or be or feel what you don’t like against your own will or whatever. Women give birth as they do as a completion of pregnancy and writers write after carrying some thoughts and ideas around. Be you, I say into the mirror and to you-you. Be authentic, this is more than enough. This is the love of your life, for yourself. Be there for your inner anti-hero and the outer ones, your beloveds. Love your human-being lover, kids, family and friends not because of their perfectness nor for what they present into the world. Love them because of their there-ness and laugh the thoughts away, alone or together.

birthing..

                                                           supported by my two child-Doula's

At Remi's birth I was blessed with an amazing midwife Tanja Piererfellner,  The One mr. Babypapa, and three(!) Doula's, one Doula-doula Natalie Bidmon, two child-doula's: daughter Livia was there 95% of the time and she was amazing, son Davin has been pouring water over my belly during the earlier opening-stage when Liv was still asleep.. Thanks to all of you for your there-ness!