Birth

Nine years ago something happened which I was not entirely prepared for. I was a frightened caged animal. I had lived in captivity my whole life. I bonded with a male of my species. He was the first that I bonded effectively with, so he became my mate. Soon I was pregnant. Everyone around me was a frightened caged animal. They could do nothing to sooth my own fears. They were busy drowning in the wealth of their own terrified floundering. Far from being helped by others of my species that had once undergone the same experience, I found that they were obscenely domesticated, agitated by the repellent truth of their own bodies and unhinged by the new and obvious instance of my own. I began to discover things on my own through weird chances, a few random glances through the holes I poked in the box that had been the world since my own birth. I heard tales of women who gave birth in their own homes, and women who opted against vaccination, and women who squatted to birth their young instead of lying on their backs. Inside of the box I was treated as though I were sick, as though I were a sickness myself, something very disturbing to the other creatures in the box. I was too young to be overly brave, too uncertain to insist on too much, so though I longed to run away into the wild and find a quite ditch among some brambles and do what it was in my nature to do in a place away from accusing, and prying, and clinical eyes I submitted to the conventions of the day. I did hold firm on giving birth without the assistance of any pain killers. I arrived in a hospital early one day because something like water was leaking from my vagina. I was tested with a little swatch and treated as if I was very silly and told that my water bag had not broken, and I was not giving birth, and they sent me home. Less than six hours later, I was having real contractions and my father and my mate delivered me once again into the hands of the hospital staff. This time I was admitted. I was permitted to walk the halls and squat and stretch as I pleased. I asked not to be hooked to an IV but they insisted, and soon my resolve against it was weathered away by that insistence. I was young. That asked which drugs I would prefer, and I told them none. They stood in the halls and snickered amongst themselves, certain that I would beg them for their medicine in the end. I never did. There were none of the complications that they had used to frighten me into being hooked to the IV. My baby was healthy. I was changed from then on. I knew with a certainty that they were all cowards and liars. I knew that I would always have to fight to protect the important things, my true nature, and that of my new child. I knew that it would be a struggle to do more than peek through the holes I bored in the box, I knew that my fellow inmates would try to frighten me into remaining within our prison. I had been young once. Now I was something else. With the birth of my first daughter, wisdom was born within me, a knowledge that stemmed from my very core, and a resolve to do justice to that new knowledge of life. I ceased to be the domestic creature that I had once been, and began to seek out the wild that lived within me.