Just three weeks after I flew off to my new life on Maui, I returned to LA for a birth of another kind: to be with my best friends during the birth of their second child. This will be the fourth birth I’ve assisted, and I’m just barely starting to be comfortable with people suggesting that I’m a doula. I’m not trained, except by the immediacy of experience, nor do I have any desire or intention to do that (extraordinarily profound) work in a public capacity. But being with dear friends in the space of labor and birth is a gift, a complete and utter transformation.
The first birth I attended was in 2008, just three months after I was with my mom during her death—and I immediately recognized similarities in the physical extremes the human body went to through these processes. People are often horrified when I say this. I get it. But I also remembered talking to a midwife years before about the “swinging door” of birth and death. I wasn’t the first to make that comparison.
Still, I didn’t fully understand the literal and metaphysical meaning of it all until I experienced deathing and birthing in their totality. Until I saw the wild, unearthly extremes the human body was capable of, both in departing this earth and in bringing new life into being. Each birth has been different, and each is the most primal, potent reminder to be fully, painfully present in my life. To consider how hard each of our mothers worked just to bring us into the world. To awake each day with urgency. To fight for breath and choice and aliveness at every turn. To be as present with pain as we are with joy.
Yesterday I went back to Topanga to pick up some stray mail. I held my proverbial breath on the drive up, worried it might be painful, or confusing, or even worse, that it might feel so good I wouldn’t want to leave. The beauty of my old home was everywhere, undeniable. But it didn’t hurt. It felt ok to have birthed myself into a new place, a new moment. To have gone through a many years-long labor of life and discovery and heartache and release to (re)create myself, to find myself anew. More than ok. It felt like the first flood of oxygen into fresh lungs.
