Birthing Dreams
By: Her Crescent Moon Bear
Tags: Birth, Heart, Puppies, Nomad, New Beginnings

It is the small of the night. The moment in the ever-ebbing, daily tide of light that is briefly paused. A wave turning so that it may suck back its force and contents.

At this moment it is darkest. Most still.

Neither a breath in nor a breath out.

A pause.

I am sat in this dark space. My hands on a swollen, fur-covered belly. This creature has withdrawn after her hours of outward looking and nest making. She has gone where all expectant mothers want to go.

To the place between.

She lies still but for the movement of her heavy breath and the small paws that occasionally ripple the surface of her side.

She is waiting.

We are waiting.

Every so often she looks up at me or shuffles to move her front paw on to my arm. Is she comforting me?

“Remember?” her body seems to say to me “you knew how.”

“We know how. You and I. Creatures of fur and flesh.”

In all my recent and not-so-recent loss my world has felt as though it held only deaths. Deaths little and gargantuas. Deaths of confidence. The deaths of ease and comfort. Deaths with each remembering of what I cannot touch. The little deaths form a large mass that sucks and pulls.

I swing between modes of agency and of incapacitation. New birth of any kind does not seem possible. How could it?

My time for birthings seems over. Another dream or life made of makings and growings. My body knew how once. It no longer does.

The first pup is on its way. A streak of red paints the fluid that slowly has left the mother’s body. “Soon” I say “good dog”. I remember a midwife leaning over the edge of a birthing pool holding my hand. “Soon” she said “good girl”.

I was anything but a ‘girl’ in that moment. My body was strong and large and I had been labouring for almost two days. As I transitioned I entered that darkness all birthing creatures sink into. I feared actual death. Death from enduring the length and weight of the pain. Death from being unable to escape. I felt my bones breaking. The ripping apart of a bond and a body. “Stop” I thought “Go back to when I dreamed.”

“I cannot do this” I said between contractions to the midwife. I meant it.

“But you are doing this” she said.

I was. I knew how.

The laboured swollen dog grows agitated and signals to me that we should go outside. Into the dark we hurry and then back to the warm room with its cushions and towels. She wants to run and move. In and out we go while she thinks her body wants one thing and then changes to wanting another.

The violence of the first pup making its way into a world of lights and sounds (its closed eyes and ears won’t hear) sends a shock of adrenaline through me. He is born sideways and in a sack full of meconium. I rush to do what I know.

We will be ok. I know how.

The pup wriggles and breathes after what seems like too long. The mother dog starts to lick his wet body and she lays still now. The rushing and chasing of feelings and relief has ended.

In ten hours time both mother dog and I will wake next to 8 suckling puppies that were each pushed into the world and loved till they breathed. I think of my little boy, only hours old making chicken noises as he slept curled next to me on the bed.

I have birthed dreams made of green fields. Dreams of seas of faces and neon signs. Dreams of dusty hills and donkey’s hooves. I birthed the dream of a boy whose body felt like a frog — wet, slippery limbs and a soft belly still connected to mine.

I have birthed laughter and sparks in the eyes of long lost friends. I have birthed clouds of love while gripping the hand of another and moving my body in time with theirs.

I have birthed new lives in new countries, friendships made of scribbles on paper and coiled strings of wool.

I have birthed 8 puppies, 37 piglets, 14 goats, 7 lambs, 26 chicks, 11 ducklings, and one slippery wet frog.

“We know how. You and I. Creatures of fur and flesh.”

“Remember?” the wriggling pile of soft fur seems to say to me.

“Soon”