A few days ago I was part of a miracle. I assisted a woman to give birth! I had intended to write about it then I stumbled upon an unpublished blog post i started on on the 4th July 2018. Clearly I was trying to reclaim my independence on this day. So much has changed since I wrote the below post.
"On the day I bravely shared my #metoo story I had a total emotional breakdown. I had a moment of grace.
"The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cures. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace-a gift of god, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate self-examination and repair" - M. Scott Peck
So on International Women's day (2018) I posted a blog on my #metoo story and off to our new offices I drive, with the parts to rebuild our desks and start a fresh. I grab my recently excavated Beyonce CD and pop it in. Pretty Hurts plays. I play it again and listen a little harder. All the way to Zoo Lake I play Pretty Hurts on repeat. The words: The illusion has been shed. Are you happy with yourself. Are you happy with yourself" crescendos and baffles me. As I pass Zoo Lake I'm catapulted to the moment where I was waiting for the road to stop streaking past as I opened the door of a moving car at 2 AM ready to jump into Zoo Lake.
A choking yet quiet feeling turns on the "You need to cry" service light. I stopped by a school and parked. I felt nothing. This puzzled me. "I should be feeling something"I thought to myself. I realized that since I discovered I had been raped I had not cried about it. I had not mourned that naive girl who thought Sunday afternoons were safe. I hadn't mourned the illusion I had built, falling apart. Then I began to cry. A deep, gut sucking mourn. Quietly and strained the tears streamed. I cried and it rained. The rain cloaked my mourning as quizzical cars passed mine. Then the shaking started. I had never felt overwhelmed with emotion like that. It felt like my body was inside out and the slightest breeze would shake up an exposed nerve. I couldn't work the pain away as I had planned. Grace has a way of doing that; ruining your plans.
By the grace of God (ironically) Kutlwano, my best friend was having a meeting minutes away from where I was. I parked my car in Greenside and dialed her number.As soon as she said hello, the shaking started up. All I could muster was, "I'm not okay, I'm at State 5." My knight in feminine shining amour arrived in less then 5. I just cry in the middle of Greenside and tell her about the Zoolake, pretty hurts trigger and that I was scared that he would read my #metoo blog and accuse me of lying. She scooped me off the gravel of my shame and took me home. The loves of my life and business partners forbade me to come to work but instead, insisted I rest for as long as I needed. There's that grace again.
I get home and hibernate. I realized that every time I'm supposed to be feeling my way out of the pain I distract. Work, sex, alcohol, conflict whatever needle I can find to numb myself. As I lay in bed the voices scoffed at me, you don't even remember what happened so it's not real rape. Stop acting so wounded." But grace held me close even in that moment of self-flogging.
From that day I had dull yet sharp pain on my breast bone, like a blade was lodged there. The body keeps score and it was tired of counting."
That's as far as I had written of the post. I completely forgot about it until now. Wow that was brutal. Healing is truly a messy business and I'm still very much in it. It's how I started the journey of becoming doula.
2018 was a year of deep spiritual labour pains. I spent last year doing and finally finishing the artists way. It was really about self-care and self-love for me. In one of the exercises they make you dig deep and make you think of what you wanted to be as a child. I'm suddenly 5 years old again accompanying my pregnant mother to the doctor and a woman in a white bathrobe amidst the throws of labour is brought in. I immediately find her some water and use a magazine to cool her down. With that little bit of comfort I was able to give , a seeding, a spark. I was fascinated by pregnancy and birth until I told my biology teacher that I wanted to be gynecologist in grade 10 ( No one knew about doulas 21 years ago). She gave me a book visually depicting the myriad of sexually transmitted diseases newborns can get. In a few pages my fire was completely extinguished.
So when I did this exercise the seed was reborn. And so when I wrote a list of how I was going to love myself better in 2019 becoming a doula was top of the list. As I sat in class and our incredible lecturer tells us that birth can trigger memories of rape in birthing mothers I thought to myself "Lord I can't afford to bring my traumas into such a sacred space". Right there I knew I had to deal with all my womb has been through: Rape, Abortion, Miscarriage of twins. And what could I use to heal myself? Storytelling.
BirthRite is a documentary we are developing to explore African women's birth stories, African birthing rites of passage and how we can reincorporate them into the post-colonial, modern birthing experience which is reclaiming it's soulfulness, it's Africaness. Its not just about giving African women a platform to share their experiences but most importantly for me it's an accountability partner. BirthRite is about me DOING SOMETHING RIGHT NOW TO OWN MY GENIUS and strip away my fears. By documenting my personal journey of healing, becoming a doula and later my pregnancy and birth, I give birth to the real me. I give to the world this being, this piece of work that will be my legacy of women re-empowerment and the rebirth of us.
