A brief note before my story begins. A note to the mothers, a note to the fathers. To those who have birthed live children, and those whose young ones were taken too soon. This story— my story, our story—may be distressing to some, particularly those who’ve experienced the birth of a sweet babe, born sleeping.
If this is you, darling human, please feel free to leave this post here, taking all my love and comfort with you. To those who wish to stay, thank you for holding my heart during these moments. It is a gift to share the depths of my humanity. It is a gift to know my heart has been seen, held and loved.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C.S Lewis
***
I’ve asked if my baby has died and no one is saying a thing.
The midwife moves the doppler across my stomach as I stare at the wall lit by dim orange light (my favourite kind.) There is no sound, no heart beat. There are no voices. There is silence, loud as thunder.
I ask again. Has my baby died? Still, no one says a thing. There are three midwives there. Not one of them has said a thing.
My body begins to push, and once again I am taken by the strength of the contractions. If my baby has died, I think, then I need them to take this pain away. But it’s too late for pain relief, I know that. I’m already pushing. I am on my own, no matter what is happening here.
There is a stillness in the room that wasn’t there before, and I know it is the feeling of sorrow. My sister is across the room, and so is my husband; the sadness is theirs and mine, and maybe the midwives’, mixed together with an odd cocktail of hope and confusion. Is the baby alive? Why on earth won’t they say anything?
Finally I am asked to change positions. They want me to push. Finally they have found a heart beat. A little slow, they carefully tell me, but a heart beat, thank goodness. I will need to give a great big push, they say, and I am okay with that because the midwife has said the only words I have wanted to hear. ‘Brooke. Your baby is okay.’
At least two minutes.
That is how long I thought the very worst.
Now, we move on.
As I breathe between contractions— between pushes—my eyes fall upon the midwife’s necklace, a butterfly on a thin, silver chain. It makes me think of the angel chain in my sisters hand, the one I’ve given her to hold, so Nan can be with me. It had been Nan’s right before she died. I had given it to her. Now it was mine.
And there is the stillness again. In the butterfly, in the thought of my Nan’s chain.
Another moment divine.
***
I gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl, that night.
She is perfect, and was so from the moment she was born.
I will never forget those moments of indescribable togetherness and comfort.
Was there a divine presence in the room? I’ll never know.
I was sitting on a public toilet, talking to an invisible person in my mind.
It didn’t occur to me to think it strange. It was about eight months into this new woo woo phase of my life—the one where, among other things, I seemed to be picking up some pretty wonderful advice from an invisible world that I still wasn’t entirely sure I believed in. Could it be that my guides and angels were just a figment of the wonderland that is my imagination? Well, yes. That was entirely possible, I thought.
And yet, by that point in my awakening journey, the number of psychic experiences popping up in my life had become so great that I was starting to wonder how I could still be in disbelief about it all. I’d even started to think back through the years of my life, looking at some of the daydreams of my past (visions that I can still see in my mind, that had oddly come to pass years later.) At the time, I’d passed them off as coincidence. Now…I was slowly changing my mind.
Back to the toilet then, shall we (sorry about that, ha ha ha :P) I had been leaning into the woo woo stuff at that point, really trying to learn about it and figure out how I wanted to use it in my day to day life. Here was a good opportunity to connect. My husband and I were about to go to Teppanyaki where shy me would be seated at a table with (omg) strangers, and not only that, but I’d been experiencing a bit of depression at the time. I really was a bit nervous as to how the night might go.
So I asked for help. ‘Guides,’ I thought, can you please show me/tell me something that will happen tonight that might help me?’ You have to understand that, at this point, I was still highly skeptical about the validity of my relationship with my guides, or even if the woo woo existed at all. And so, when my imagination flashed me a vision of a lady leaning into me, deep in conversation about something that seemed to be quite profound…I let it in, and then I let it go.
It was probably nothing.
With the vision, though, came a strong knowing that this lady had something very important to say to me and that I should absolutely listen and go with the flow of where the conversation was taking my thoughts and feelings. I admit I was curious.
The evening wore on and I forgot all about the vision and my silent conversation with the invisible people. The food was delicious and the wine was also wonderful…it really did seem like it was going to be a fairly nice night, and completely woo woo free. Until the cook, who was sizzling the food right there on the hot plate in front of us got out his playing cards and announced it was time to play a guessing game.
Well. What a perfect opportunity to test out my guides, hey? Surely they’d be able to give me the correct answers if the woo woo stuff really was real? And so, I did what I do. I asked them for an answer. As the cook shuffled the cards, he asked the lady beside me to think about what number she thought he was about to reveal. She ummed and ahh-ed and laughed and smiled. Number 3 flashed into my mind.
I can’t remember the number the lady chose. All I remember was the shock that surged through my body when the cook turned the card around. It was number 3. What a coincidence. Next guess belonged to the ladies’ husband, and again I asked my invisible people for the answer. 6, they flashed at me.
And 6 it was.
This happened one more time, and once again my ‘guess’ was correct. By now, I was almost bursting with what on earth is happening to me! to the point where I turned to the lady beside me and confessed. ‘Oh, my goodness. You’re not going to believe this.’
It was what happened next that I will never—not for my entire life long—forget. Thelady leaned into me, just like in the vision. And with a very serious face she said: ‘As soon as you walked in the door, I knew there was something about you. You had a glow that no one else had. I’m a little bit psychic too, so, yes. That’s how I was able to see.’
I nearly fell-off-my-chair. The vision had come true, which essentially told me that my guides had listened to my question and given me the answer, just as I had asked them to. Not only that, but the universe just so happened to sit me at a table with a lady who could help move me forward on my journey. I mean, guys. How could I not believe after all of this?
What followed was a profound conversation between me and my new woo woo friend about the nature of the universe, about my worries of how to fit the woo woo into a life I’d already made sense of. This new ability (or at least the sudden awareness of an old one) changed everything for me, and I really wasn’t at all sure about how to integrate it all. She told me she didn’t use her abilities as a job: they just were, and she just accepted them as a part of her life. I’m starting to think maybe that was the very message I was meant to take away from the conversation.
Acceptance seems to be what I’ve struggled with the most on this awakening journey. Learning to trust that what is happening in my life is happening for a very specific reason, whether I know what that reason is, or not.
I’ve not communicated directly with my guides much at all since then because, honestly, I’ve been SO afraid. This new truth of mine just gives the world another reason to make me feel as though I don’t quite fit in: and that is something I’ve struggled with my whole life. But with the upheaval of this whole ‘awakening’ has come a profound anchor into an inner strength I’ve never known. That’s why I’m slowly starting to accept everything that is, and speak openly and honestly about it all, no matter how it frightens me. It’s okay if people judge. I accept myself, and that is all that really matters.
Not only that—I’m finally starting to love myself.
brooke-cutler.com 