She cried out for God her whole labor.
She arrived at 6cm, only 4 more to go.
She was an older woman.
Saying this was her fifth baby, I would soon learn it was her fifth living baby,
but her eighth birth.
She had been through this before.
She was tough.
The grit in her teeth and the dirt under her fingernails—
this woman was a hard worker.
This labor would be quick and fast, that’s the space she gave it.
~~~
My fingers reached too far, I was making things harder than needed,
I backed out and there it was,
duh,
right where it should be at 7cm.
I felt her cervix, it was soft,
open,
ready,
but she’d have to wait a few more pulls.
She’d joke between contractions,
smiling a toothy grin and a belly laugh with her mother and cuñada in the room.
Her pains progressed,
her body knew this work.
Seven other times she had writhed and moved in this way.
Surrendering the work to her body that was moving freely.
She would cry out, calling in,
“Dios Mio! Padre Santos! T’kman Dios!”
The baby’s head was dropping,
making her way through the slippery tunnel of flesh and life.
Parting her lips her red fluid kissed my blue-gloved fingers,
painting them a new purple color.
The head was there, she was nearly crowning.
As I saw the contraction that would deliver the head,
my ears waited for her to call for her God, her Padre Santos,
the one whom she turned to in the moments of most need.
But what I head was something different:
“MAMA!”
She now called to the woman who had given her life in this very way,
she reached out her hand for her mother.
Perhaps the most awaited of all moments in birth,
the crowning,
and here God was not what she asked for.
Her own mother was whom she prayed to, reached out for.
A colorfully clothed woman with a liston in her hair and
gold in her smile
—before her daughter’s words even left her parted, dry, and panting lips—
was up out of her seat,
sensing her daughter’s need,
as only a mother can.
She knew her mother would understand this moment in her every cell,
for she too had lived this.
She called for her mother in deep understanding that her mother knew this moment,
intimately,
and so did she.
The two of them had shared a moment similar to this exact one,
though the roles had been different.
~~~
Oh the timelessness of motherhood caught in a single moment.
The power of the love of a mother,
whose place is not challenged by anyone, or anything.
Giving birth to a daughter is giving birth to a mother,
and a grandmother.
Only a mother can understand this universal gesture of love:
greeting a new life as it intuitively dances its way through
la cerviz, y el cuello de la matriz, la vagina
into the arms of a mother who has given a gift of this
neverending,
everlasting,
gesture of Love,
of Motherhood.