Day 70: Another Birth Experience

Today I got to experience my 5th birth with a doula client.  Though I actually wasn't at her birth because it became a cesarean delivery, I still got to support someone else through the hard work of labor and the joy of holding your baby for the first time.

Each birth is a new experience. It's own rhythm, its own rules, its own ritual of welcoming in a new life into the world. There is so much about it I still don't know, but I'm learning more how as a support person, I don't need to worry so much about the medical side of it as I need to channel my own knowing as a caretaker of life. I'm not a mother myself, yet, but I know there is a deep part of me that knows how to do it already.

Although, I know enough to know that if I read the above statement years from now as the mother of a 7 or 8-year-old, I will probably laugh at how much I thought I knew that I knew. Just like how birth never goes the way we think, I suspect parenting is the same way, except it is everyday.

But for now, I will give myself the comfort of confidence.