My Ocean Birth
11 years ago, on October 11th, my first child Azeza, was born in the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean. I imagine most mothers reflect upon their birth story as the birthday of their children rolls around. Every year, I celebrate his birth by contemplating the profound lessons I learned that day. His birth story is a particularly magical one because it is the fulfillment of a long time dream I had, one that most said was impossible. It is a story of listening to my inner wisdom in deeper ways than I ever had before. It is a story of defying the odds and choosing to do something because I believed in my heart it was the right choice for myself, and my unborn child. It is a story that fortified my confidence and trust in my intuition, forever changing how I navigated adversity and resistance from others. It is a story of how I followed a dream, kept my sights set on my desired outcome, and prevailed. And of course, it is the story of my rite of passage into motherhood and meeting my child for the first time.
As a little girl, I dreamed of giving birth in the ocean. It felt completely natural to me. I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t born this way. We came from water. Isn’t it natural to let water be a bridge between the worlds of the womb and the earthly plane? Why not let water soften the landing and welcome newborns in a elemental loving embrace? This vision faded into the storehouse of my memory until I was a couple months pregnant with my first child.
During a meditation, I remembered my yearning to give birth in the ocean. I began to research any resources I could find on the subject. I found very little. The one resource I did encounter was a Russian water birth video that documented women giving birth in tidal pools in the Red Sea. When I first saw it, I cried. The sentiment touched me so deeply it sent a tingling wave of affirmation through every cell in my body. During my outreach, I obtained the email for a woman who had worked on this project. I reached out to her and told her my vision. I was surprised and disappointed by her discouraging response. At first I felt frustrated and then I felt angry, who is she to tell me what I am or am not capable of. There was no empathy in her response and I thought if anyone would understand it would be her. After having an emotional moment, it was becoming more and more apparent that if we were going to do this, we were going to have to forge our own path.
The first 7 months of my pregnancy was spent doing a lot of meditation and traveling to different power spots in the U.S. We were guided to spend a couple of months in the Southwest to learn about crystals. We studied them, meditated with them, slept with them, and created energetic grids with them on my swelling belly. As we cultivated this burgeoning relationship with the mineral kingdom, our psychic awareness expanded. We began to hear direct communications from the minerals. We were simultaneously deeply studying the work of one of our spiritual mentors, Drunvalo Melchizedek. We met with him and a group of indigenous elders from around the world for a 2-week ceremony in Sedona that focused on the imminent shift of consciousness upon humanity. It was a very rich time where I felt deeply connected to the Earth, the multi-dimensional realms, and my unborn child.
When I was 6 months pregnant, I was ready for the next part of our birth plan to concretize. Where were we going to have this baby? The only options in the United States where the water would be warm enough in October were Hawaii and Southern Florida. We had been focused on Hawaii because we were on the west coast. I had reached out to a few midwives there and they were strongly dissuasive. They talked about every negative outcome you could imagine, pollution, my baby getting taken away by child services for neglect, etc. I had never lived in Hawaii and was unaware of the general climate regarding midwifery and home births, but it was clear that the fear I was met with was not the choice I wanted supporting me.
One day we were on a 10-mile hike in Zion National Park. It was a spectacular day. There was not a person around besides our two companions. At the end of the hike, my partner and I had a magical moment. Within seconds, we knew Florida was the place for Azeza’s birth. When we returned home that day, we contacted a midwife based in Miami. She was shockingly even about our plan and told us to meet her when we arrived in Florida to talk it out. I was surprised at her neutrality given the resistance we had been experiencing from all angles thus far. I reached out to a couple more midwifes in the area. One was very excited, as she has always wanted to do it herself. She had other women come to her wanting to do an ocean birth, but none had actually followed through with it. Finally we had some great options to support us with our plan. A couple months later, we arrived in Miami.
When we first met midwife Mary, we didn’t know what to make of her calm, nonchalant demeanor. It confused me. She again didn’t seem to swing one way or the other in terms of her opinion about giving birth in the ocean. She did however encourage me that if this is what I wanted we should go for it. After sleeping on our meeting with her (and meeting the other midwives), it became crystal clear that Mary was the one for us. Throughout our appointments, she continued to be a calm and steady rock. No matter what story was going on for us (we didn’t know where we were going to do the birth, we were staying at a friend’s house and weren’t having luck finding a permanent space, to name a few dramas,) she always gave us words of encouragement. Every time we left a session, I knew I was in good hands and that none of the details really mattered. When it came down to the birth, we were going to be in exactly the right place and situation. I could continue to worry about which house, which place, what items were needed, and the weather, or I could simply keep my eye on the end result, relax, and surrender. Every week she reminded me to do this. It was the most incredible gift and I don’t know if I could have gone through with the ocean birth without her support. The last weeks leading up to the birth were such an incredible lesson on when we focus on the end result and we surrender, we can then allow grace to take care of the rest.
As with most births, surprises happen. For me, my water broke and I didn’t go into labor. It is law in Florida (which turns out is an incredibly progressive state for home birthing and midwifery!) that labor must be initiated 24 hours after the water breaks to prevent infection. When it was obvious my labor was not going to begin on its own, midwife Mary administered every trick she had up her sleeve. We began with me drinking castor oil in gas station orange juice (yuck!) and shortly after we did an enema. In a prescribed period of time, when this didn’t take effect, she gave me some Chinese herbs in tea. I also had some homeopathics. These few hours were a deeper surrender trusting whatever happens. I came to terms with the possibility of having a hospital birth. Our dear friend, who is an acupuncturist, was in flight from the west coast. He had booked his ticket months earlier to be one of the first visitors post-birth. It was one week after my due date and we thought this was a safe bet to meet the baby. Little could he have imagined that as soon as his flight landed, my partner would be waiting for him at the airport and racing him back to where we were staying to give me acupuncture to initiate my labor.
When he arrived, we were in the final hours before I needed to go to the hospital. He immediately gave me golden needles in the points on my legs that were known to activate labor. After the session, we all went for a walk on the beach. When we returned, Mary asked me if I felt anything happening. I said I don’t think so. She wanted to look at my belly. Sure enough, I was having contractions and had no idea! They were consistent and three minutes apart. It was around 8 pm on October 10th. Whew. I followed her guidance to try to sleep if I could. Fortunately I could sleep through just about anything. I once slept during a bus highjacking in Brazil, eventually waking when one of the gunmen was standing right next to me yelling at my neighbor. I went to sleep and woke up around midnight to full on contractions and the castor oil kicking it at full effect (I’ll spare you the gory details of this half hour of intense purging. Lets just say I felt like was in my early days of the start of a mushroom trip.)
Once the purging passed, I made a cave in the tiny bathroom, alone in the dark. My partner was holding vigil in the hallway right next to me, and the midwives were in a second bedroom, listening from afar. For the next 5 hours, I stayed in this space in a completely alternate reality. I would feel a surge coming and take slow, steady, deep breaths riding the wave. Once it passed, I would fall asleep sitting up. This went on for hours. A couple of times, I didn’t wake up in time and missed the wave. I was pummeled in the intensity of the contraction. Besides those few moments, my experience of labor was intense yes, but also transcendent and dare I say, blissful. I did not have any back contractions which I later learned in my second birth were impossible to deep breathe through. I was able to stay in this space of part sleep, part meditation, part out of body.
Just before I transitioned, I saw a small ball of light circling around my head in the dark and heard, “It’s time.” Moments later, I felt a big shift in my body and my midwife came in. She asked me if I wanted to go down to the ocean because if I did now was the time. Mind you I had not spoken to anyone for 5 hours and I was in another universe. I said you decide, I can’t make any decisions right now. She said, “You came all the way here to do this, let’s go.” I said, “Ok” and asked my partner to grab my glasses.
The next 10 minutes were totally surreal. The 2 midwives, myself, my partner, and 3 dear friends, entered a brightly lit elevator in alert silence. We descended 4 floors and were deposited in a parking garage. We walked through the garage and then through the pool yard. The support midwife said to me, “Don’t you dare have a contraction here. Hold that baby in.” When I started to feel a contraction coming on, somehow I was able to minimize it and keep walking. We crossed the bike path and came to a decked walkway that led to the beach. As soon as we stepped onto the decking, it was as if we crossed a threshold. I felt the ocean breeze on my skin and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is exactly where I was supposed to be. My whole body softened and I made a beeline for the water.
We were on a very public beach, on a holiday weekend, and fortunately it was early morning and still dark outside. There was no one around. The sound of the waves (yes there were waves!) and the wind blocked out my unbridled, animalistic soundscape. We made a sort of star formation with my partner and one friend each bracing my elbows. I was squatting to steady myself in the waves. Midwife Mary was standing in front of me with one hand on my shoulder and the other checking for the baby’s head. The support midwife was bracing her hips from behind. My other two friends were in the water holding space (and taking pictures which I had no idea was happening!) Pretty quickly, a chill set in and I was shivering. This was the one thing my midwife did speak about as something we needed to monitor. My contractions were coming steadily though and she could feel the top of the baby’s head after my first push in the ocean. In between contractions, I felt so incredibly peaceful. I gazed at the stars. Orion was directly above me. The half moon was nestled on the horizon. It was magnificent. I was told afterwards that a stingray was circling around our birthing party for the whole time we were in the water.
35 minutes after we entered the ocean, my son was born. Midwife Mary caught him and swiftly brought him out of the water and up to my chest. Someone quickly wrapped us in towels, and I hustled out of the water as I was trembling at that point from cold. The midwives wrapped a big pad between my legs so that we could go inside to birth my placenta. As we were walking away from the ocean, the sun began to peek its face on the horizon, casting a warm orange glow upon where there had just been darkness. Again we trekked across the path, through the pool area, up the elevator, and to the bed. We caught a glimpse of the first early morning runners down the stretch of the bike path heading in our direction. I can only imagine what they thought seeing our crew. I birthed the placenta, warm and cozy, looking into the wide-eyed face of my baby for the first time.
The whole time I was pregnant, we thought he was a girl. We were so convinced that we didn’t even check after he was born until about a half hour later when the midwives were filling out the paper work. At that point they unwrapped the towels from him and he was most definitely not a she. It was a humorous and humbling moment. The sun had risen at this point and swimmers were in the ocean right where we were (and nowhere else!) only 45 minutes earlier. Azeza’s birth was magical in so many ways, one of them being the impeccable timing of his emergence. If he had come any later, we would have been witnessed by people and probably had the police called for multiple offenses – at the very least indecent exposure! He entered through a magical window, embraced by the darkness, and cradled by the soothing exquisiteness of the starry night sky.
Throughout Azeza’s whole pregnancy and birth, I felt such a deep and palpable connection to the Earth and my relationship to her as her daughter. There was no separation between me and the crystals, me and the ground we slept upon, me and the ocean and her creatures, me and the stars and the sky. I was connected. We were connected. We are all connected.
Now 11 years past, this still remains without question the most extraordinary experience of my life. As the years have gone on, I have become aware of deeper layers of wisdom gained from Azeza’s birth. Every year I reflect upon a new gem that shimmers, highlighting a facet I have only recently discovered, from the treasures seeded back then. This year’s crowning jewel is celebrating how fully I committed to my vision and despite overwhelming resistance, my attention remained on my desire. From this experience alone, I now have a cellular memory as proof I can have anything I want and with the key to success being unwavering focus on the outcome as done. Whenever I doubt myself, I return to this moment and soften into the truth that everything is possible.
Dare to Desire!
Kristen