One: Beginnings

As my baby's head began to crown, the gathering around me reached its crescendo. My midwife guiding my efforts and husband exclaiming in relief as he began to see his daughter for the first time, millimetres more of her perfectly wrinkled head visible with every roar of involuntary effort.

My friend, another midwife, puffed into the door in a sweaty, breathless 'ohmygodyoureamazing'. I'd heard my husband call her as my body began to bear down and I urged him to get her here. 'I don't think you'll make it' he said, but she appeared in the next moment as if by time travel, defying physics to be there to gather with me as my baby entered the world. Just as I had stood by and witnessed her become a mother a few months earlier. Just as we had both witnessed so many women as they made that same, life changing transition.

Her eyebrows are perfect, said my husband. Her eyes are perfect. Her nose is perfect. Each feature revealing itself in its miniature glory, and to his relief. A gleeful "Marvellous" rung out from the doorway, as two more midwife pals arrived and took their places. One clapped her hands together with pleasure as she knew that this new mother was so nearly already born. The other stood poised, ready to act should I need it. My eyes shut tight as my body exploded in half, my mind focused only on surviving this red hot moment.

And then she was here. And the gathering silenced, or roared, I'm not sure. All I could hear was the relief pounding through my head. I have survived. I am still here. It's over and I have survived. Somewhere in the edges of my awareness the midwives did all the doing and I stared at my baby and I concentrated hard on being alive.

I have thought in many moments since then about all those who had birthed before me. How every human on the planet is a result of a mother going to the edge of herself to bring them here. Of the gatherings that have held birthing mothers through this moment through all of time. Holding her space, holding her nerve, holding her as she holds her new baby.

Though I've mothered through the pandemic, I didn't become a mother during it. The stories of solitary labour and abandonment in that most vulnerable moment of birth, of the lonely milky, tearful, swollen early days, those stories are not mine to tell. But when I remember the warm huddle of those who welcomed me into motherhood, I cannot help but also wonder what of the women who, through Covid or trauma or through shortcomings of our systems around birth, were not held as they made this same journey. I wonder often, how can we hold them now, and will that be enough?

This is part 1 in a 21 part writing series: Why Gathered? Why Now? By Rachel Barlow @rachelb.gathered