Every birth story is a creation story

my postpartum mantra

Sky Woman by Ernest Smith 1936

Birth stories take time to comprehend. It can take weeks, months, sometimes even years before we understand it in it’s entirety.

I remember bouncing my daughter on the exercise ball in the middle of the night once my stitches healed and I could be the one to tend to her colicky crying. I stared out the window as Venus rose and fell to the horizon, stitching the story back together in my mind. This happened first, and then this, and then…

Birth stories, even the ones of “uncomplicated” births, are deep and complex. There are many movements, many undercurrents, many feelings.

Birth stories are never simple, because they encompass the entire, profound journey of a new life being created.

Birth stories are complex because they are creation stories.

And creation stories are rarely easy.

Most creation stories around the world are full of floods and fires, falling and loss. They are accounts of huge, cataclysmic change that gave birth to the world as we know it.

Creation stories don’t always have a predictable story arc. They don’t end tied up in a bow. In fact, creation stories don’t really end at all… because they are the story of a beginning. And every new world begins when an old one ends.

In those hard, hazy days of postpartum, when I often felt my psyche shaking from the shock of this fall—and my mind would gravitate to Sky Woman, the creation story of the Haudenosaunee.

In the tellings that I’m familiar with, Sky Woman falls through a rend in the universe while pregnant, slipping from her own world for what seems like an eternity to land on Earth. The fall is devastating. But even harder, this world she has come to is full of water with no land on which to live. She is guided to the back of a great, benevolent turtle—but one cannot make a life from shell alone.

And so, creature after creature dives to the bottom of the ocean to bring back mud for her. And one after another, they fail.

One after another, they die in the attempt. First beaver. Then loon. On and on until, finally, humble muskrat finally reaches the bottom.

He too dies, but clutched in his hand when his body surfaces is the bit of mud needed to create a new world.

Every birth story is a creation story.

And often it requires great loss, sacrifice and surrender.

I reminded myself of this as I asked ‘why’ in the months that followed my birth. Why didn’t things go according to plan? Why had postpartum been so hard? Why did the labor feel like falling out of the sky for an eternity?

I touched the parts of me that dove over and over again to the bottom of the ocean in the midst of my labor…and failed. The parts of me that died, had to die, for that blessed handful of new Earth to finally reach the surface.

The part of me that felt like my entire world ended when the new one began.

I would repeat this phrase to myself like a mantra, inlaying it into my mind as a mosaic.

Every birth story is a creation story.

Every birth story is a creation story.

Every birth story is a creation story.

It is the story of the creation of an entirely new body arriving here onto this planet—literal new Earth being made in this world—but also the story of a new life coming into form. Your baby’s…and yours.

Everything about the world you once lived in has changed. As if a great hole opened up beneath you and you fell, alone, into the raw beginnings of a world that can seem entirely uninhabitable.

And so it’s ok to have your own birth story be hard. For it to be deep and complex. For your feelings about it to be deep and complex too.

Creation stories are never simple.

But they are always meant to be openings into new worlds.

A friend told me recently about a teaching of Michael Meade’s that struck me. Meade, a renown storyteller and mythologist who has studied the earliest myths on Earth, says that in our most ancient stories, there are no tragedies—only tricksters.

At the core of our human wisdom is an acknowledgment that all tragedy is just an opening to something else. All suffering a matrix out of which newness comes. There is no endings, only beginnings.

No tragedies—only trickster stories that are leading to entirely new worlds.

This, I think, is the reason why we continue to tell creation stories. Not so we can remember how the world was made, but how to endure the times when our own is unmade. How to survive endings. How to walk through a birth.

Perhaps this is why we need, dearly need, to tell our own birth stories.

And why, I think, the world needs to hear them.

Every birth story is a creation story.

Every birth story is a story of the world, newborn.

Mud

What was it like for Muskrat,
to dive down through the
waters of the world
to the very bottom?

When he touched the silt
was there a shock of joy
for what was there?
A solidness waiting
for him
in the darkness.

Is it always this way?

Must we always give the very oxygen
in our lungs
to get to the bottom—
not knowing if we will ever
see the top again?

And— most important—
how did he do it?

How does one carry a scrap of mud
in the curl of one paw
through fathoms
leagues
miles of dark blue water?

This is the miracle.

Every time we go down
and resurface

there is still something
left to hold onto. 

Mud 
is the material 
of a new world.