✨Siblings at the birth - my story.✨

When I was nine years old I watched my mother do something remarkable.  It was powerful, raw and wholly feminine. 

She gave birth. 

She laboured throughout the afternoon and into the evening and I read her ‘Fuzzypeg Goes to School’ as she sat in the bath. She rocked and swayed her way around her bedroom and found her birthing position on the floor and in the arms of her sister; her midwife by her side, my father and seven year old sister sitting at the end of their bed.
I knelt beside her, and when she said she couldn’t do it anymore, I grasped her arm and said, “Oh but you can mummy, you really can! You must!”, and I watched as my brothers head entered the world, turning perfectly, his eyes opening to meet mine, before the whole of him followed. 

Until then I hadn’t considered what it meant to be a mother. 

Or a woman even. 

But as birth changed her, so it did me. 

I can see that day in full clarity like a silent film, buzzing with gentle movement, understanding and love. 
The women at his birth held my mother in her power. 
They embraced her space and lifted her calmly through the natural, most magnificent event that is childbirth. 

Today, I embrace the mother, without judgement, however she needs me. 

We are the guardians of all the magic that happens within a woman’s body during birth; a guardian at the gateway to this world for the precious beings that arrive. 

I am a doula. 

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