A year+ on from birthing Sadie, I’m beginning to find my voice and put some words around my experience. It’s been a long journey of integrating and processing and reflecting and raging and counselling and grieving and accepting and questioning. But as ever I land in a place of gratitude...
- for my healthy, thriving, toddling heart-child daughter.
- for my power-house love warrior life-wife, Charlotte.
- And for my doula, Yolande.
A beacon of wholesome warmth, Yolande was unflinching in her holding of me - from the early months of our pregnancy right through to the reluctant induction at 42+1 and the roaring battle that followed - she was deeply present, steadfast in her support and always armed with a magical homeopathic remedy or three.
Throughout our pregnancy, she would come through all weather to sit on our lounge room floor and drink tea and listen carefully as Charlotte and I teetered on the brink of Motherhood - bumbling through our hopes and fears.
She listened with tenderness to our obscenities and outrage as we attempted to find a place within the hetero-normative world of antenatal classes who were shockingly ill-equipped to welcome a same-sex couple. Yes, even in London.
When the time came, she fought through the midwife station to reach us on the labour ward. With the strength only a yogi can muster, for HOURS she held my hips, counteracting the forces of the surges through labour, intuitively tracking the rhythms and writhing of my body as Sadie travelled through me.
When shit got really crazy and all was crescendo-ing into the final hour - she advocated for us and gently reminded us of our own authority - encouraging me to trust & follow my body. She saved my placenta from being binned by the blazé midwives and packed it neatly away into an esky. She fed me a bashed up banana and helped me sip the token hospital tea. She literally mopped me up - cleaned me, dressed me, put me back together and got me to my feet - for the first time, as a Mother.
All around me was the bloodied shit-storm of the birthing suite - seeing my dismayed shock at the after-birth carnage - she gently/hurriedly tidied away the blood soaked towels and debris with a sweet, whimsical not-to-worry comment about how “birth ain’t for the faint-hearted.” She sure ain’t faint-hearted. Amidst all this, she placated my bereft panic with tender reassurance as our baby and Charlotte were whisked away from me to intensive care. Yolande stayed with me right through the night until I found them again.
She made me potions and lotions and herbal tea bags to steam my busted bits. She brought me flasks of homemade soup and magical cacao remedies. She visited us often in those early weeks - unbeknownst to us, as one of our only visitors - as London went into its first lockdown.
Above all, she witnessed me become a Mother. She witnessed my family Becoming. She unflinchingly held us across the biggest threshold we will ever cross: smiling her knowing smile and championing us the whole way. Birth sure ain’t for the faint hearted - and I can’t imagine what I would have done without you, Yolande.
Happy World Doula Week!