Birth

Most of us spend a lot of time trying to “connect,” though it means different things to each of us. Connection feels essential, even desperate sometimes, because to be alive is to enter a never-ending cycle of separations.

Birth is the first, of course. And for fuck’s sake, I was lost in sensation then, well fed, often a bit anesthetized. Yes, I heard the crying, what I know now as crying; the screams occasionally, but I was safe within the soft container, pillowed and feathered and hydrated inside and across the surfaces and curves of my little self. Growth was just a natural thing, the walls widening to accommodate.

Then, later, sometime later, I had to get out, had to escape this place where oxygen had become scarce, and I became aware that my needs were causing her discomfort. That was the first time of a thousand times I would feel this.

What was the unknown, full knowing? I will rip through these walls if I have to, tear into her ambivalence. She doesn’t want me to leave; she doesn’t want me to stay. I only want to leave.

Then there is squeezing and prodding and light seeping in, pushed out through what I now know is her body, ejected through the narrow cavern between the land masses of her thighs. He was here before me. My brother came through this path before me. His cells accompany me. And now I am leaving him forever. He will not be waiting for me. They won’t let him stay.

Out, I am out. Then, the stranger’s fingers. The alien digits touching me all over. The white coat in a white room, those white, hairy fingers. I am not able to stop them. The first of so many times. Grabbing and pinching, trying to separate me from the cocoon in which I have always known myself, in which love for myself is just a sweet deep rhythm. Fingers that explain to me that I am dependent on them, rough or gentle. I understand the message immediately and deeply; I am not free. Birth … the first separation from self.

***

And another thing. I watch this woman who gave birth to me come to the close of the life into which she had been birthed. I am aware of some of her separations – from her father and then her mother, from Henry, from my father, from her firstborn, from Peter and Julius. From others, I don’t recall or never was told. I stand with her as she stares blankly into the living room, by this time cruelly named, and I feel the weight of what is behind her against the flimsiness of the present and the weak argument for possibility. I feel in my own body her return to the original connections, and the consequent separation from me. I feel her disappear from me into the vastness of her before. In this moment, though she stays a little longer, a daily apparition, she has already left for parts once known.