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Into the wild, I'm going into the wild, I am. It's been a while, freedom child, since I left my roots back home. Into the wild I'm good. Into the wild I am. It's been a while, freedom child, since I left my roots back home.
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Welcome to the Free Birth Society podcast. This is a radical space for women who are ready to celebrate their autonomous choices in birth, motherhood, and beyond. Together, we'll learn about wild birth through personal narrative, we'll explore the politics of birth, and we'll analyze everything that relates to our lives as women from a feminist perspective. Here's your host, Emilee Saldaya. It's
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been a wild freedom change.
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Hello. Hello. Emily here. Okay. It's time, my friends. I am finally here ready to share my most recent birth story seven months later. If you are newer to the podcast and you haven't yet heard my first birth story, I'll drop it here in the show notes below if you wanna check it out. It was, of course, a very different birth, and it's a great story, so give it a listen. I also did an episode earlier this season with my husband on my pregnancy and basically our last year. So if that interests you, you can also find that in the show notes below as well. Alright. Let's do it. So I've had two pregnancies, and both pregnancies have resulted in my children. I asked for both pregnancies. I timed them in such a way that worked into my vision of my life and year with ease, and I'm really grateful that the universe agreed with my plan. I haven't so far ever felt done with pregnancy, like so many women report. I love being pregnant except for obviously all the times that I don't love being pregnant, of course, but I love both of my birth experiences and not because they were easy but because they were exactly what they were which stripped me of so much bullshit. They taught me endless lessons, and they both in different ways really humbled me to my literal knees so that I could have these children. Birth is birth. Birth is everything. I love birth and all that is available to us as birthing women. So, I'm here to tell you this story as it wants to be told by me today, the story of my birth with my son Sawyer James, my second child. I was somewhere just past or around forty one weeks when the story begins. Two nights before my son was born, I awoke in the night with sensations in my womb and a pulsing from my third eye. From deep inside, I heard bloom, bloom. And from the deepest center of my uterus and out from my third eye pulsed these psychedelic mandalas, these flowers with throbbing gorgeous petals mentally vibrating bloom bloom. As I laid there, I thought, okay, so this is it. The sensations blooming mandalas from my third eye in my womb certainly were. So I figured that I would lay there until I couldn't any longer, and the next thing I knew the sun was waking me up, and I had made it to another day without giving birth. At the exact same time, the very next night, the exact same thing happened. Except this time, the sensation woke me up and lifted me up to my knees, and I began to immediately gyrate my hips. And I heard a moan escape my lips as this ache from deep inside my womb gripped me. I mentally chanted again, bloom. Bloom. And once more, there were those psychedelic flowers. So, I stayed there for a few waves with my sleeping husband next to me, our four year old daughter in her bed just a few feet away. And the strong sensations weren't really something new to me in this pregnancy. They had begun around thirty four weeks with real regularity and had already pulled me from the bed in the middle of the night or had me leaning over the countertop in the recent weeks. So, you know, I thought to myself, I'll just stay here and see if it passes. But instead, without any thought, I quickly got up and began to walk around my chambers lighting candles, pausing to lean on the wall, moaning, breathing, and couldn't help but notice that this wasn't like other nights. In not too long, my noises woke Suniye up, my daughter, and she began to cry a little. So I went to her, I showered her in kisses, and told her that the baby was coming, and that I needed her to go sleep with grandma who was on the other side of the house. So she sweetly and begrudgingly obliged, and Johnny took her away. In that short window where she was awake in the room, and I was also being pulled into the birth portal, it was very clear to me that I didn't want or couldn't handle navigating her or anyone else's energy, and I felt real relief when she went out of the room. Because I had considered even fantasized about having my mom, my daughter, maybe even a girlfriend at this birth, but as soon as I had felt the deep sensations I knew that my suspicions were correct and I would do this birth alone, mostly alone, with the quiet space holding of my husband just in the background. So once it was on, the idea of adding anyone else's energy to the room became literally unbearable. Every birth is so different, and perhaps, you know, one day I'll have a birth where my children are floating in and out of the room, and it was just definitely not going to be this one. Alright, so for three hours from twelve thirty a. M. To three thirty a. M. I just labored. I had spent weeks setting up the tea room that is adjacent to my bedroom as this perfect gorgeous sacred birthing space, and about an hour in to the birth I told Johnny that I wanted to get into the birth pool which was already blown up in the tea room. I had suggested that we rinse it out. By we, I mean him, and he declined the idea, and once there was a good few inches of water in the pool he realized that yes he should rinse it, and now it was very very heavy, and to fit it through the door to empty the pool to the outside he was going to have to deflate it. So I was standing there swaying and moaning watching him do this fairly ridiculous dance with the birth tub and trying watching him try to get the birth tub out of the door in the middle of the night full of water, and I suddenly remembered that I had a gorgeous bathtub with roses and candles all already set up in my bathroom. So, he drew me a bath, and that was where I hung out for quite some time, and the water felt really good. The bathtub that I have is huge. I could stretch all the way out, and I was diving in. Each wave took me deeper, and I remember mostly feeling good, mostly being able to let go and just be with it. I got out of the water and labored next to the tub. I was aware that I still hadn't seen any bloody show, and my waters were still intact. Alright. This is where it gets more interesting. So there are so many layers to the psychedelic landscape of birth, and many things are happening at once but in different layers. So in the physical space, I was moaning by candlelight in my bathtub. The words that I spoke were few and far between. Open, open, water, and such. But a few layers back, I had a running script of old stories, insecurities, doubts, weird and obscure thoughts. I noticed them. They would float through and they would sound like you're not really in labor. You're overreacting. You're making this up. You're being dramatic. This probably isn't even real. And then I would switch into the observer tracker layer of my consciousness, and I would check on what's real. Like, what are the facts? What did I know for sure? Okay, so I knew I was having sensations that required my full attention. I knew that I was high as a fucking kite. I knew that I wasn't in the bathtub moaning open any night prior to this. I turned to Johnny and said rather desperately in between the sensations, I just want to see something tangible. I just want to see a tangible sign that this is real. And on the very next sensation, my warm waters opened with a pop, and I screamed in surprise and felt such relief. Okay. I thought it's on. Holy shit. No turning back now as if there ever was. So celebration hung in the air for a moment, and it felt really good. And just a minute later, I rushed to the toilet to have really what I could only describe as an Ayahuasca purge, meaning there was no time to resist it, no time to think about it, to not want to do it, and the purge itself, it felt ceremonial. It felt easy, sweet even, and it brought me into a deeper wormhole really. Like as I purged, I was being pulled into a deeper realm, new layers, and it was all happening really fast. Being pulled deeper, deeper, deeper into a new layer of consciousness, really. I was very, very high after that. Within minutes, my body began to push. My eyes were rolling back in my head, and I I couldn't look at anything in the room. I was leaving planet Earth. So things were very different now. My body was pushing, and it hurt. It was everything all at once. It was like I was being pummeled by ocean waves, and I knew I had to let it happen to get to the other side, but I was scared. I was caught up in the feeling when you're caught out in the ocean in a riptide. The waves are crashing down on you, and your instinct is to fight. But really you need to allow. Also, I don't actually know if that's true. I'm not a lifeguard. This is just an analogy. So I was being pummeled. That was how I was experiencing it, and it really it felt like too much. I was on hands and knees, a she tiger. All of the layers of the trip were communicating with me. I cried out, I'm scared, and it felt really good to say. Johnny was steadfast. Didn't hero me at all. He was grounded. He was silent. He was soft and strong, unafraid. He made no attempt to reassure me or comfort me until I begged him to later on. I wasn't scared of anything in particular. It didn't have a story attached to it. I just felt fear, spiritual fear, fear of the bigness, fear of the melting. Right? I noticed really quickly once my waters were open and it was on that if Johnny was in front of me on the floor holding my hand in full entire presence, I could organize myself better. My thoughts were more positive. I could chant things like affirmations. I was being pummeled by the cosmic ocean less. But, of course, he couldn't be entirely present a hundred percent of the time because he had to fill my water or get more towels or adjust the camera, whatever. And so if I open my eyes and saw him looking at his phone or the camera or elsewhere or if he didn't catch my lip smacking gesture to signify that I needed water, I was snapped back into the room where it really, really hurt and where I felt like I was drowning. So that was huge. And one of the biggest lessons I took away was remembering the art of presence. So when I had his full presence, I could chant. I choose this. I want this. I choose this. I want this. I would hold Johnny's hand, and it felt less scary. It felt less big. It felt intact. It felt whole and organized. Not necessarily positive, but just like I was more okay. I did more work in the bathroom, and I got higher and higher. I was rolling around from my hands and knees, rubbing my head like a snake, like, rubbing my head back and forth on the cold tile of the bathtub, trying with desperation to find any position where it felt like my hips weren't going to break. I was completely consumed by the pain. It was otherworldly. I was breaking. It felt like everything in me was breaking, and my body continued to bear down and push and rest and repeat. And as my body pushed, new insecurities would surface from somewhere deep inside of me. It would just float up. I would hear these thoughts. You're not doing it right. You're not strong enough. Your muscles are too weak. You're not staying with the urge to push long enough. These aren't doing anything. This had happened in my first birth. Weird thoughts full of doubt and confusion would go on in the background, and they didn't even feel like mine. It felt like darkness fucking with me, and I kept returning to my anchors. I didn't plan my anchors. I don't know that you even can. They just showed up for me in that birth and in this one. One of my anchors in this birth, this is kind of dark, but it was this thought women give birth in comas because they do. I know that an unconscious woman will still eject a baby. It was strange but really comforting, and I just kept reminding myself anytime the dark thoughts would try to shake me and then I wasn't pushing well enough, it's like, well, women give birth when they're unconscious, so I'm okay. I kept returning to what do I know? What do I absolutely know that I know? Okay. I know my waters are open. I know I'm having big pushing sensations. I also know that babies come. I know that my body can and will push this baby out. I know that these doubts are just thoughts. It took me hours to catch up to the truth that this was actually my labor, that this was how it was happening, and that it was happening now, and that there was nothing I could do or even needed to do about it. Another anchor that went on in the background of the entire six hours of my birth was a song, a song by one of my friends. Her name is Willow, and it's a song she wrote called Headwater. Maybe it can be an anchor for you as well. It was something that she had offered to the Matriarch Rising Virtual Bundle, and then our other friend, Hannah King, had as a gift to me put pieced together all of the song circles from the festival into a track, like a long track of all these songs. And so I was playing it in the days leading up to my birth. And, yeah, this one was very, very fresh in my consciousness. And thank God because it really helped me a lot. So the song goes,
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head water help me find some space to be
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Clear
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water. Help me find the clarity to see, to speak. White water help me to move on. Call out the Canyon. Purify this grieving heart. Nourish every channel and wash away the sting of these wounds.
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And I would just it between the waves, and it was running deep, deep, deep, deep in the back of my mind, the entire labor. The closer that I got to birthing my son, the more I felt like I was barely hanging on. I was being pummeled by these cosmic ocean waves, and I had moments where I really wondered if I would survive. Is this surrender? It didn't feel like it. It felt like something adjacent to surrender. Facing the harsh truth that you're not in control, the only way is through, and you just have to hang on and let it happen, and get your mind right so that you can call on all of your inner resources to shift out of suffering. In the physical realm, I felt so much pain. Expansion beyond what I wanted. I remember thinking, this is the wrong order. This isn't supposed to be so painful. I got the wrong birth. I was switching back and forth between laughing at the thought of getting the wrong order because, come on, that's funny, and sincerely believing it at times and feeling pretty overwhelmed by well I guess we would just call it resistance. Right? I thought on every woman who told me that their birth was painless, and I felt so much confusion because the only word to describe what was happening in my pelvis was excruciating, mind bending pain. I didn't experience this in my first birth. It was never more than intense. This was the biggest, brightest, most blinding sensations I've ever had. And I was so high. I was so altered. I was healing. I could feel it actually happening. I was meeting parts of myself, the false queen as sister Morningstar calls it. I was really meeting her, not hiding. There she was, talking trash to me, placing doubts, trying to confuse me, and then there were my anchors. And birth was happening. So many layers all at once, all in the room. Johnny was perfect, except for when he wasn't, which was very few and far between. Really my only complaint, and it's a very very tiny one, but I'm still gonna say it is that he had chosen a rather small glass water cup for my water source, and I was so thirsty because I was screaming and breathing so heavily. You know my throat was really dry, and so yeah I was taking these quick sips as often as I could manage, but I couldn't believe that the cup would ever run out. Like I just thought that was insane. I couldn't believe that he would have to go stand up and walk away to fill it, And I remember thinking to myself, I remember thinking, next birth I will have a goddamn camelback. I will be naked, shitting myself, screaming, and crying, but by god I will have a camelback strapped to my back so that I can get my own fucking water. And then I would get these flash images of me doing exactly what I was doing, but with a backpack of water on my back, and I kept bursting out laughing in between my screaming and crying. Quite the image. I couldn't have even begun to explain what I was laughing about, and thankfully, Johnny said nothing because, again, he was nearly perfect. So I remember towards the end of the chapter that I labored in the bathroom, I was getting deeper and deeper and really just in the underworld of it all. And I finally said to Johnny, who I think had been literally silent the entire time. I said, could you just please say something encouraging? And in this kind of monotone flat voice, he just very calmly went, you're doing great. I can't even do it. He goes, You're doing great. Your body knows what to do, and I thought it was so dumb and so weird. I just shook my head, and it was just like, Never mind. Never mind. And went back to screaming and crying and laughing and dying and living. Okay, so I was fairly desperate before I shifted into the bedroom, and I was just facing the crushing reality that there was no way out of this. Like, is there anything more intense than facing that? My hips hurt in a way that didn't make any sense to me. None of it made any sense to me. I couldn't bear the positions I was in. I tried the birth stool. I mean, I just I tried it all. I was so desperate to lay down. So I made my way to our bedroom and just pathetically flopped onto the bed. I tried to explain to Johnny that I just wanted to see how the sensations would go if I could just lay down. My legs were cramping and shaking, and, you know, all I wanted to do was get off my feet and off my knees. So some of you have done exactly this, and you know what I'm going to say. As I laid down on my side and prepared for the next wave, I was having Johnny hold my leg up. The contraction began, and I was so deeply full of regret and paralyzing pain. What was I thinking? It was awful. Of course, I can't lay down. So this part felt chaotic, hopeless, wild, you know resetting, surviving, letting go, breathing, begging my baby to come out. I finally just piled up as many pillows as I could find around me and made a stack on my bed and just like flopped over like a dead fish. It's really how I felt probably how I looked, and again I can't really say I surrendered. It was like something adjacent to that. Gave up maybe. I only ever had touched that space before in well I guess my most recent many years ago my last Ayahuasca ceremony a few years ago where I had just been beaten to hell for hours puking my guts out, and the medicine just ringing out, my woundings, my darkness forcing it out of me like black sludge. And I was just begging her for a break and never getting one. And I remember finally just giving up and telling her, Okay, take me. I can't fight this anymore. Just fucking take me. She did, and I'll never be the same. This was very similar. It was like that. It wasn't the fully like I trust everything, so I can let go and surrender. Not at all. It was like I've tried every single way to resist you and handle it and keep it together and fight it out, and I'm just out of ideas. So I really don't have the vocabulary or the words, you know, maybe the words don't even exist for what it felt like at the end. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. It was really horrible. I mean, it's almost funny reliving it. It was overwhelmingly terrorizingly painful. I moved down to the floor off the bed leaning on the bed in the same spot that I birthed my first child. Johnny was on the bed holding my hands, and I could feel my baby coming down into my canal, and I was a hundred percent entirely convinced that I was being ripped in half. I have heard so many women describe their birth like this for so many years, and I could never understand it even after I had my first child. My fifty two hour labor in birth didn't ever really feel painful. It was intense. Sure. It was birth, but it just wasn't painful. So maybe the few seconds of the widest part of the head emerging, you know, the ring of fire yeah. Okay. Maybe that was painful, but that's, like, so fast, and I really quite enjoyed pushing. I loved her coming down and out, but with this one, oh my god, there were no words. My hips were breaking. I was sure of it, and as his head came low, it really truly actually felt like a bowling ball. A real bowling ball size was inside my vagina, and nothing made sense. I was crying, begging, losing my mind, talking to him, and just I was in an entirely different reality. At some point, his head came out, and I asked Johnny to look at it because you know how it is. You can't really tell what anything is, and it all feels so weird and strange and rubbery. Like, it could be any part of a rubber chicken at emergence. So I have him go back, and he commented that the baby's head was out and that his hand was out with it, a nuchal hand. So I don't know. Maybe that's why it hurt so much. I don't know. This in a way was the worst part sensation wise, but I was also very very stoked to discover that I actually had been in labor and a real baby was actually on his way out of my body. I swear until I could touch the head, I just couldn't tell what the hell was happening. Like his sister, his head came out, and his body waited for quite some time. I talked to him. I moved around and waited. This time, I hated feeling the restitution when the baby rotates. Yeah. I absolutely hated it. Everything hurt. Oh, dear. What a moment in time it is to be on your knees with a human head hanging out of your vulva, suspended in space begging and crying. Wow. And then another wave, and he flips out onto the ground. He did kind of a forward somersault of sorts, and he landed smack on the ground. Johnny kind of fumbled around. And before I knew it, he was in my hands. And, gosh, when I look back on it all, I can remember, you know, how relieved I was that it was over, and that's all I could really think about. I mean, he was limp and floppy and not breathing just like Soon Yiye rubbed his back and talked to him, and I didn't need to look. But, of course, I did, and I said, you are my boy. I knew you were my boy. I knew you were my boy. And I held him in a tight hug and took a big deep breath, looked up at Johnny, eyes filled with tears, and I was just in absolute shock and awe. That was it? What the fuck just happened? Where did I just go? That was my birth? I just held my boy close, and I just kept saying, it's okay. Take your time. I'm not worried about you. I'm not worried about you. I looked at him covered in mucus and gunk and fluid and thought about this bizarre ritual that so many providers and and even mothers themselves participate in, the sucking of a newborn's face in their first few minutes of life. I felt my quick interest in wanting to do that, in wanting to help, in wanting to hear him cry, but I just breathed instead and smiled and kissed his face knowing that he would claim his life. And he did. His first cries that happened eventually were unlike anything I had ever actually heard in my life, and I have heard a lot of new humans make their first cries, but this baby, it was weird. It was like a baby cougar. It was so wild and so cat like. It really was very striking to both of us. Thankfully, he never did that crazy noise again, so he was here. He was perfect, and I was rocked. After the initial transition and welcoming of my boy, I was quickly thrown right back into the reality of how incredibly uncomfortable I was. The sensations were still going, and sitting on the floor was not working for me. I was so uncomfortable, so sore, still so blown open. I just felt like I couldn't handle it. I still felt chaotic like I was losing my mind, so I told Johnny to grab the bowl and then come close and hold the baby. I got into a squat. I traced my fingers up high on the cord, and I hooked the cord with my fingers and just yanked it out. It was quite primal. I just knew I needed it to be out for me to finally relax. It was it was rough. It was exactly what I needed to do, and women confuse this idea of not pulling on the cord because yeah strangers who don't love you should definitely not be doing that, and I would be hard pressed to believe that anyone really besides the mom should ever do it. But but me? Of course, I'm not gonna hurt myself. Of course, it's okay. I wanted it out, so I got it out. With SUNY, I had waited almost three hours, but I was absolutely not down to do that again. And last time, I was. It was relaxed last time. I wasn't in chaotic pain. This needed to end. So once the placenta was out, we settled into the bed, and I could finally take a real breath. Holy mother of God. I did it. Of course, I did it, but also I did it. You know? So it was at that time around seven in the morning, and I texted my mom who had been sleeping in our guest room with our daughter. She was awake, and so she came in, and that was a really sweet moment. Her entering my room and coming to sit on the bed. Everything so fresh. The placenta still warm in the bowl next to me. My son nursing his first nurse and my mom getting to be the first person to enter our little love bubble and see this baby her first grandson. And then at some point relatively soon, Soonie woke up and joined us, and it was just as I had assumed. It was love at first sight between Sawyer and Soonie. She wanted to hold him, and it was starting to feel annoying with the cord. So I made a spontaneous decision to just cut it instead of burning it like we did last time. So I said a prayer to the baby, to the placenta, as Sister Morningstar calls the placenta the first mother thanked her for doing such a wonderful job caring for her baby and I realized in that moment that it was my late grandmother's birthday the day the morning that he was born. A grandmother who was very very very important to me, important to all of us in our family and was really the glue to the paternal side of my family and a grandmother who had not so long ago passed and one that I often feel here in my home. And here was her great grandbaby arriving on her date of birth into my family. This birth was a psychedelic bitch slap from the Divine Mother herself. That was really all I could say about it for about a week. I was rocked beyond anything that I had previously knew. I was reborn. I was forever changed. I had healed in real time. I had met my power. I had met my doubt. I had met me. I understood so much more and had melted even deeper into the mystery that it is to be here with this consciousness, with this body. At some point in those early days, I called or FaceTimed Yolanda to tell her the story and and tell her how painful it was and how rocked I was and she just listened and cried and you know was so sweet and said you'll probably definitely figure this out by your ninth, which I loved. And what is there to figure out really? You know to me one of the big takeaways of this birth was I still did it, right? Like I met it. I resisted. I suffered. I experienced pain beyond beyond what I knew existed in my body, and I did it, and I birthed my baby, and that is so epic, and I love that, and maybe I'll have a euphoric birth another time. So I'm going to be returning next week, wrapping up season six with an episode on postpartum. So I'm gonna leave my story here for now with us snuggling in bed with my family, and I'm I'm gonna pick up next week where we left off today. So thank you for listening. It's a bit surreal to be here seven months postpartum telling the world this story because it's just a story now. Right? As every day that's passed before us becomes. So Sawyer James is now my bright, smiley, relaxed little guy who has melted so perfectly into the fabric of our busy lives here. And next week, I'm going to share about my integration, my mistakes, my triumphs, my highs, my lows, and how long it took to really fully arrive into mothering two children and so much more. Thank you so much. Take care.
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And that's it for today, my sisters. Check out everything we do, including one on one and group coaching. Learn about our private membership, in person retreats, and more on free birth society dot com. Our online courses are on free birth society courses dot com, including our flagship course, the complete guide to free birth. Don't miss the radical birth keeper school if you're ready to become the authentic midwife that women are searching for. Together we rise and the revolution starts inside each of us. I'll leave you with our free birth society theme song, Wild Woman by Aruba Red.
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I honor you for the wisdom you held, the ancient traditions of plant medicine and womb magic. I feel the spirit of the ancestors as I place separation of our young to be forced upon me, will not allow the separation of our young to be forced upon me. My sisters will no longer birth in captivity. The beak it line redefined from burning our wild women to paralyzing us and drugging our babes. Strapped down in a clinical white bed, drying up the milk from our breasts, keep your needles. My family will never again be doomed to chase those dragons or your poison. We reject your fear. We choose love. Everything with intention. Death, ascension. I will fly and bring her back from the star. Wild woman, she still lives in Sahar. Wild woman, from you, I will not hide.
