Birthing

"I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen

The weather would be the most obvious thing to talk about today. But I don't want to talk about the weather, perhaps I am not so needy for simple, peaceable human contact this morning. I want to look at the season, the cycles, spring. I want to look at what April brings.

A couple of days ago I found some great photos on a moblog. One photo was of tight pink flower buds breaking through an unfocused green background. The artist had written a poem as accompaniment:

"words like violence
break the silence
come crashing in
into my little world
painful to me
pierce right through me
cant you understand?" -CalyxAlex's Photos

to which I (unthinkingly?) responded:

Violent birth which opens into life, we are inevitably pierced, we always grasp at that which we must let go.

I wasn't really sure what that cryptic comment had to do with the guy's poem, but it was related somehow. What the comment really did was make connections for me. (So let me take a moment to apologize for my comments, friends. Sometimes they are me talking to me. Unconscious remnants. Connections. I provoke. Any exchange is fire. )

April is such a violent month. Why did I never see that? I must ask my mother about her feelings toward April. I seem to remember sitting in my farmhouse kitchen in Maine long ago after receiving two letters "etched in black", to quote Dolly. Her mother-in-law died in April and within a week her father had died as well. There was no comfort surrounding death in our family. No joyful expectation of "rebirth" in heaven. Death was an evil thing, not talked about and superstitiously denied.

I saw the movie Birth last night, with Nicole Kidman, about a woman who desperately clings to her dead husband. Ten years after his death, just as she has seemingly "let go" of him and agreed to remarry, a 10-year-old boy who claims to be her dead husband and knows intimate details about their relationship, enters her life. The movie is heavy with images of the cycle of life and death, death and rebirth, born in water, buried in soil, rising and falling, like the waves on the ocean as the movie ends and Nicole Kidman, newly married, is drawn toward the sea. (Nicole Kidman is fantastic, by the way. And guess what? Anne Heche redeemed herself in this movie with her best acting yet.)

Women giving birth are so close to death. That violent expulsion with its proposed joyful ending leaves us battered, somehow changed. Some of us don't make it. The rest take it in stride. We know things. We deny this knowing, this rite of passage, and the medical estabishment treats us as silly containers, they usurp us, put us in wheelchairs, tell us not to follow our instincts.

Breasts have (again!) become blow-up toys for men, who judge which are the most attractive. Silicone. Saline. B, C or D? DD! Too much space between them. One is bigger than the other. As our corpses decompose, will our breasts live on? Oh! I digress. Or not.

I cling to the sweetness of April. Wearing hats made of paper plates, garish tissue flowers and ribbon tied under our chins, our child selves marched smartly around the gymnasium in a swirl of color. We were buds, and our mothers, carrying the scars of our births, watched us proudly from the bleachers. Denying the biological functions of their own bodies, they learned to feed us formula at only the appropriate times, burying the knowledge of sweet milk going unused, soaking the front of their nightgowns, memories of death and rebirth, and the mystery that birthing brings.

"Just put us out," they said. I need to not feel the pain of childbirth. Let me have the good with none of the bad.

Running toward the light, we bring the darkness quickly.