Honouring my Mother on this day of her Birth
My mother is an obvious connector to birth for me – she birthed me after all. But the imprint my mother left me with around birth runs deeper than that. And today, 69 years since she was born at home in Athlone, and 12 years since she died in a car accident, I would like to honour her and the deep lessons of birth she imprinted in me. My mothers’ own birth story sounds like something from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. She was born at home in Athlone, on a hot windy Cape Town day, the second child to my grandparents. While my grandmother sweated and grunted and birthed the large round baby that was my mother, across the street, a house burnt to the ground, consuming not only the entire house but a woman inside it too. Birth and death in the same street on the same day. Because she was born so close to Christmas, she was named Carol. A huge relief to my mother when she found out that that the alternative had been Julie. The Little Green Statue my mother clutched while she birthed me After generations of birthing their babies at home, my mother was the first in our maternal lineage to birth in a hospital. She wanted to birth at home but she was far from home, a single pregnant woman living in a communal house in Switzerland. She wanted to birth at the communal house but the man whose house it was, stamped his feet and proclaimed that under no circumstances would that African girl squat down and birth in his house. She was too far from the alternative midwife run birth centre she felt would be a good alternative and so some friends chipped in to pay for the nearby and very exclusive Stefanshorn hospital where my mother was induced a week before my/her due date. She was left to labour on her own, on her back with a fetal monitor strapped to her. She held onto the little verdite statue, a bust of an African woman she had been gifted back in South Africa by a grateful woman when she was a rape counsellor. This little statue was her doula, her birth companion, her connector, back to South Africa, as she birthed me far away from home. My sister’s birth 3 years later, was a planned home birth in Bern, the birthing pool set up in the lounge. but my sister decided to trigger her labour early and emerged on Easter Sunday while the midwife was away on holiday. So we drove with my mother’s friend to the hospital and I remember sitting on my haunches, colouring in at a low table, while my mother laboured and birthed in the next room. I was expecting a little brother called Michael. I had been singing to him for months and was surprised when I was introduced to a little sister called Kate. Six years later, we were living back in South Africa, this time on a farm an hour outside of Ceres and we had to do the long three-hour drive to Mowbray Maternity hospital so that my mother could birth my little sister Gypsy. For my sister Jasmin’s birth, I was at school. It was 1991 and what had once been the ‘whites-only’ part of the local Ceres hospital, had recently been opened for all South Africans to use. Jasmin’s claim to fame is being the first coloured child born in that section of the hospital. My mother said she slipped out like a bar of soap. Living rurally,...
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