I had devoted great practice to acutely listening to my body. Something was wrong. Every cell in my body began to scream of death. My body withered in pain, with no relief. Pressure building to a point of no reprieve.

With every blink of my eyes, darkness wrapped around me. Mere seconds, seeming to last for hours. In the darkness on the backs of my eyelids my life began to play out before me. Memories of everyone I’d ever been. 

I was a child, home from the beach. My body still floating on the waves of the ocean. Running up the stairs into the stale heat left over from the day. Pink and orange sun drenched the slanted floor in promise of tomorrow. The aged unfinished plywood was so smooth and soft on my salt soaked feet. 

I sat hidden on my grandmother’s lap wrapped in her housecoat. The warm, red plush pressed against my face. Muffled giggles as her arms wrapped around me, hiding me further. My brother running by looking for me. 

The cot on my front porch creaking under my weight. Inherited quilts heavy against my small frame as I nestled in for a nap. The sun slanting in through slats of the blind. The wind cool with a whisper of autumn. The sound of the leaves dancing in the large trees across the street a lullaby to the greatest nap I had ever known. 

My little chestnut dog disappearing in and out of the tall grass. His cinnamon roll tail helicoptering behind him. His ears on the wind. His fur the softest I had ever felt. 

Laughter crossing all my favourite faces. As I watch their faces shimmer and change with all the years I’ve known them. Every hug my mother had ever given me. Watching my father’s large knuckled hands move a small paint brush with tiny strokes. The feel of Josh’s chin resting on the top of my head. What his hand felt like holding mine. 

Fleeting thoughts that I hadn’t hugged my mother the last time I had seen her, that the last time I had hugged her I hadn’t known it would be my last. That that little cinnamon bun tailed dog wouldn’t understand why I never came back home.

My body was floating in the ocean. I felt my body shift and fall with the waves. I could taste the salt of my lips. The sun danced upon the waves and across my skin. I was sinking and the darkness was growing. 

I could hear screaming. Guttural screams. The kind that run gooseflesh down your arms. The kind that stands the soft peach along your spine. 

The screaming was me.

I could describe it to you, but you could never understand it truly until it rocked through your own body. Then you know. Some cannot know. Some choose to never know. Some long for the knowing. 

The pressure that builds. Greater than you have ever known. Different, and more visceral than you could ever have imagined. Pain ripples up from the core of your existence.

Ancient Magic tearing from the stardust centre of your bones. The cry of birthing Mothers from time immemorial ripping up through your lungs. You’re not the first, nor the last, but these moments of exquisite violence are all your own.

A masked mouth whispers from a face I will never see:

“It will get worse before it’s over.

Before it’s over you’re going to feel like you’re splitting in two.

But then you’ll have your baby.

Then it will be worth it.”

Nothing more true was spoken to me than those words. From a nurse whose face I would never recognize. But the truth of her words echo through me even now. 

It will be worth it.

My body heaves against itself to a point of no return. Betraying itself as it can neither go forward nor back. I don’t feel the shears, I don’t feel the cold metal of the tools that are needed. 

All I feel is the pressure and pain clinging to each other as they grow to a capacity that I didn’t know my body could hold. Crashing around me in waves of blackness and full colour glimpses of all the lives I’d lived before. Screams echoing through my ears as they began to split me in two. They were ripping me apart. They were tearing my soul from my body. I felt it leaving. 

In a blinding, white flash, I felt a slick weight heaved upon my chest. The pressure gone, the world snapped back into focus. It was done. My skin slick, with the sweat of fear and pain, blood and him. Each muscle and every tendon rippling and vibrating along my bones, in shock of what my body had done. 

And through my tears I looked at the small body that was cast upon me. Larger than I had dreamt. A brand new face nestled next to mine. And a fresh set of lungs screamed life into my face.

I reached a shaking hand to balance this new, small frame against my chest. I was weakened and empty. I didn’t recognize this little stranger. He was foreign and distant from me, his features unknown. 

Was it moments or hours before…I had been a vessel brimming with Life. Expectation and happiness bubbling over at the prospect of the Magic I contained. The Magic I was gifted to shepherd into this world. 

But it hadn’t been a gentle shepherding. It had been a violent taking. A dark sacrifice where I had been fed screaming to the flames. A bitter surrendering. 

I couldn’t recognize that the small foot that now kicked upon my chest was the same foot that had rippled under my skin. The same foot that had tiptoed along my ribs. Was the same foot that had pressed against my hand for all those long months.

I had been a vessel brimming with life. And now I was an empty shell left quivering and bleeding. I had been stripped down to nothing. I felt around inside my shell for life. His or my own, and I found nothing.

Yet this small form upon my chest kept screaming of his life. I tucked him under my chin. I did not know him, but I had laid down my life to bring him, and I would surrender anything I had left to protect him. True Motherhood is not a reckoning that washes over you instantaneously. At least it wasn’t for me. It was a choice.

I cooed comfort at him even though I couldn’t mean it. I began to sing to him:

It was written that I would love you

From the moment I opened my eyes

And the morning when I first saw you

Gave me life under calico skies

I will hold you for as long as you like

I’ll hold you for the rest of my life.

But the melody was wrong. And I couldn’t find it. I sang it in spite of myself, because I knew whoever he was he deserved it. I wanted it so much to be true. So I sang it even though my voice shook.

As quickly as it begins it is over. One moment is the breaking of waters and the next they are wheeling you to a new life with a swaddled bundle on your lap.

In the night I had rolled through contractions with comfort songs ringing through my ears. And what seemed like moments later I was trying to hum the same notes to a brand new Soul.

My broken body rippled in shock. While thread was looped and pulled through to try to make me whole again. Though in those first days I was sure I could never be.

As quickly, it was all over. I was left with no substance of myself, but clutched to my chest a piece of myself that I could not recognize outside of my body. And now I was racked with darkness and guilt for that darkness. 

I steeped in guilt because in the deepest darkness of those moments I had regretted him. I regretted the wish of him; the hope. In that moment if I could have chosen I wouldn’t choose any of it at all. I steeped in guilt because as I lay there withering in agony I had prayed to die. I had prayed to leave everyone that was waiting for me behind.

I was sure it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to know a happiness I had never known. Instead what enveloped me was grief. Thick, and unforgiving. 

I wept for the violence of it. I wept for what I had thought it would be. I wept for the little girl joyous on the beach that had become me. I wept for the hopeful woman I had been hours before. Had that been hours? Or a lifetime? And mostly I cried for the little boy that lay upon me. Because he deserved a mother much better than me. 

He deserved so much more than me. Even surrounded by all the imperfection of his arrival and the world he was perfect. He deserved a full mother. One brimming over with everything that he could ever need or want. Instead he had gotten me. A shell of what should have been.

In the darkness of the first night I could hear the exhausted sleeping breaths of a full father. Almost completely alone I stared into this small new face and I wept again. I wept for his elongated skull where I had crushed him for hours against my bones. I had done that to him. I cried for his swollen, bruised face. I cried in disappointment of a body I felt had failed me. A body that had not been able to bring forth my son in a moment of empowerment. But a body who had forced its own destruction by having my son ripped from me.

Hopelessness washed over me. And how dare it. When this was supposed to be Magic. When this was what so many people dreamt and wished for. That I had had it, and it had fallen flat before me, a dark bottomless puddle.

I stared at the small face, searching for anything familiar. Searching for any kind of knowing. Tears ran freely down my face. Sobs shook my body. As I blinked, one small swollen eye blinked open for the first time. And then another, a tiny slit in his swollen moon of a face. And he could see me. Though I didn’t recognize him, strangely I could see he recognized me.

His eyes two inky wells that held all the secrets of the Universe. He came hurtling to Earth knowing everything I had ever wondered. He could see all of me and through me. All the Ancient Magic I had poured into him, he encompassed. It glittered there behind his swollen lids.

Motherhood had not washed over me like a warm gentle tide, and I was drowning in the grief of that. But there as he looked directly into my eyes I knew he had chosen me. He had chosen me as his mother. So I decided to choose it too.

I leaned close, staring directly into his eyes and whispered into his warm skin:

Hi Briar. It’s me, your mom. I’m your mom.

And even though all those words felt foreign in my mouth I spoke them aloud. And I repeated them again and again. His gaze didn’t waiver. I whispered them again and even though in that moment only one of us believed them, we both knew them to be true.

Everyone knows that it takes a village to raise a child. But we rarely acknowledge the village that it takes to grow a mother. There is a reason sewing is done in circles. A reason why our foremothers danced in circles around embers in the moonlight. It is community we crave. Laughing faces around kitchen tables.

I could barely walk as a mother. It was then that they carried me. A husband who carried all. Stepping in and up never being asked. A mother showing up to mother her daughter into motherhood. And all the people who loved me before shone like little beacons in the night, leading me back to myself.

For me the mortar walls of the hospital was not a place that a mother could grow. In fact it was snuffing me out. I cried in that dark little room where I didn’t know day from night. And I could hear the sounds of others’ tears through the vents when the sun left the sky.

It was a dark place and I longed for fresh air upon my skin. I never found sleep and instead would cling to wakefulness dozing in and out. Obsessively watching a baby’s chest rise and fall in his little plastic box. 

I could barely walk the distance from my bed to the bathroom. But when the time came I walked straight out and never looked back. My feet slow and my steps shaky.

Suddenly the rooms of my home were large and airy. All the rooms were filled with light. But in the darkness I still cried. When I closed my eyes my trauma played across my eyelids. I found no sleep. My broken body still wincing in pain. And my broken mind telling me if I slept I would wake back in that little dark room.

As I struggled to move my body pain radiated through my bones. I was reminded of it, the trauma cold and hard beneath the surface of my skin.

They told me I was brave for what I had done. But bravery is a choice. And I hadn’t chosen it. I wasn’t brave at all. Something dark had happened to me. All I had done was survive.

They told me I was strong for surviving. But I had never felt more weak. My mind and body were broken in ways that I had never known before. In those first early days the thought of mending and being whole were foreign and unknown. My weakness enveloped me and pulled me down. I found no strength.

I wasn’t strong enough to give him everything he needed. I couldn’t kneel beside the tub and let his chubby legs kick in the warmth of the water. I wasn’t strong enough to carry him high. I wasn’t strong enough to nourish him with my body. My body crumbled beneath him and I surrendered him to the strong hands around me.

What I could do with help was have him lay upon my chest. And I lay him there everyday and I let him breathe life into me. His lungs filling and contracting to match my own. His heart beating against mine. I woke up and chose him every day. Love for this son welled up inside me and glittered along all my jagged edges. 

And I did what I always do and I kept going. It’s in my blood. I trudged through the darkness hoping light would find me. Hoping maybe I could find myself.

Collecting the glittering shards along the way. And slowly I began to float to the surface. Every day the fog cleared a little more. Every day my life came more and more into focus. Every day I drifted a little closer to the shore. And then one day I felt my toes brush against the sand. Soon I washed up along the shore: remade. My new skin, the skin of a mother, glistening in the sun.

The pain waned from my body like the cycle of the moon. And as the pain faded, I rose up stronger than before. Sewn together with golden thread, light now shimmered along all my cracks. I was fused together with the strength of motherhood. Fierce and unbreakable.

I began to recognize the boy before me. His features much like my own. With eyes that stared from a face that had once stared back at me in a mirror.

This is my baby.

A mantra I had started to remind myself as I struggled to heal, had now turned into a mantra of awe. That I had created the child before me. That I had grown this being within me. That I had brought him Earth side for air to fill his lungs. I live in sheer awe of him. 

I trace his features with the practice of religion. The sea shell of his ear. The curve of his cheek. The arch of his brow. Each crease of his knuckles. The soft peach of his skin pressed against mine. His lashes soft and fluttering. The wisp of his hair brushing against my chin. The strength of his small hand as it clutched my shirt. The weight of him in my arms. And just how very real he truly is. And I commit him to my memory and my heart. A flower pressed amongst the pages of my life. 

I had felt them split me wide and rip my soul from me. And in a way this was true. I had thought it was a taking, but as I stared at him I knew it to be a giving. My soul had splintered with sparkling shards embedding in his skin. His soul fresh and new. And mine remade. 

My heart had been broken. Broken for who I was before, broken by the weight of expectations. My heart’s life blood trickled from the cracks and into him. Pieces of my heart beating outside my chest. My heart remade and beating for two. 

The fire I walked through to get to motherhood had left me withered and charred. But, like a phoenix, I had risen from the ashes. Remade, strengthened and made whole. Golden seams glittering where I had been made new. Beauty sewn from darkness.

As I look upon his face, I know his soul to be a gift. That as his eyes fall upon me and his face fills with light at the sight of me, I know of no greater gift. That knowing everything I know now, that if I could go back, I willing would walk the same steps to have him. 

For this child, I would willingly feed myself to the flames again, and again. There has never been anything more mine than this beautiful boy.

All good mothers are forged in fire. And Briar’s mother is no different.

—Faith Farrell