My Birth Story - an unassisted free birth
A year after Lachlann joined us Earth side, I'm excited to share a piece I wrote, an audio tale and photos of the most incredibly empowering experience of my life - the birth of my son.
This piece of writing below is from a month or so after Lachlann joined our family. May you receive it as a gift from my heart. The audio tale which goes into greater detail and photos from the day of Lachlann’s birth are sacred gifts for my paid subscribers.
Thank you all for being here.
xx N
Lachlann’s Arrival
In my story, there are no doctors or scans; no midwives nor plans.
I’ve come to believe that each mother is chosen to carry a baby on their pilgrimage Earth side, and that the journey toward birth we go on is - to some degree - written in the stars. In a realm of endless possibility, of course, it would be that any event that happens is supposed to happen. And, if we can immerse ourselves deep enough into stillness, to that bottomless place where the chatter of the mind melts into oblivion, what might we hear? What might we see?
At 25 weeks pregnant, I was sat on the loo, eyes closed and breathing into the caverns of my body. In this stillness, I became lost in the space that my awareness had created. It was here that a vision greeted me: I would be laboring alone in my bathtub with the knowledge that my partner, our dogs - and no one else - was in the other room.
Even before, around 15 weeks pregnant, I was perusing Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and it prompted me to ask myself a very important question: Where will I feel safest giving birth? Home, was the immediate knowing.
I didn’t know what “free birthing” was until I was led to the work of Yolande Norris-Clark’s, which resonated deeply with me throughout my pregnancy. Of all the material I engaged with regarding pregnancy and birth, hers spoke to a truth carried in the wisdom of my bones: birth simply happens.
Throughout pregnancy, I allowed the wisdom of life and my body to inform me - to the chagrin of close family and of course “the system” which suffuses culture with messages of fear and codependency. I became a hermit, shutting out the external noise of “should” and gave myself over to the force of life itself.
On the dawn of October 6, 2022 when a click sounded from the ocean of my womb, I suppose I was so surrendered to this experience, I didn’t even recognize that my waters had released. I was peeing involuntarily at this point and was too open to my what might be to discern the difference between fluids. Even shortly after, when the inaugural contraction came to say hello in the midst of being intimate with my partner, I didn’t quite suspect labour might be in fact “beginning”. I’d been experiencing a host of sensations for about a month leading up to this day, so what was “beginning” anyway?
Before I had time to think, the waves took me. Gently at first - as if to tenderize my heart so I would remain permissive to the thunder that began to ricochet through every cell of my being. The thunder grew with vigor, each roll growing closer together. I was hit with the power of an active volcano, spitting fluid and blood with each push from deep within. I danced between the peacefulness of nothing and the blasting rumble of a burgeoning tsunami until there was nothing left but relentless momentum. In an instant of headiness, I swore the pressure of the Earth’s core was splitting my bones in two and killing me in the process.
It was then and there in the bathtub that a fair maiden cried to her man for help. In her yelps was summoned the Mother of her soul. She came to look her square in the eye and say: you do not need saving. It was in the aloneness of my own experience (and the grip that clawed into my partner’s arm) that I whispered to God and to my ancestors for the strength to know myself as the portal that I was.
The chant I’m opening, I’m opening, I’m opening escaped my lips over and over again.
Somewhere along the journey from the bath, toward the bed in our living room, my body buckled as the strongest contractions yet forced the head of my child to emerge. Then, with a series of three pushes powerful enough to shift the earth beneath my hands and knees I roared my son into the world.
It was dusk. It was bloody. This birth: it was mine.
For photos and the 50 minute audio diary re-telling the day I gave birth, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to access below. These are deeply sacred to me and I ask you treat them as such.
The paywall serves as a golden boundary for everything I share so that it remains protected and is circulated with the community of recipients its designed for - the mavericks, the renegades, the matriarchs. If you genuinely cannot afford the subscription fee, contact me directly and I will give you access. Thank you for being here and supporting my nature in this way.
With love, Nikki x