Baring Life.

I dedicate this to every woman who has born a child, or has a story because she wished to. An everyday miracle that comes with a million individual stories of pain, joy, heartache, terror, life and death. But each and every time it is a new chapter, a moment that changes us forever.

To my grandmother, Baba Rimma, I write this in memory of your twin boys. The children that you bore and yet never laid eyes on, before they passed. 

To my mother, who was beaten and abused during labour and left to bleed in the cold corridors of a Russian hospital. To waking up each morning and not having control over seeing your newborns, to watching new mothers read the morning list of whose babies had not survived the night. To your experience of smuggling your premature twins and escaping the hospital in the deep of Russian winter. 

The way you had the medical staff bribed to kill your babies. The excruciating pregnancies and births you suffered to bring us into the world. The hospital beds you laboured in, with bars bent by woman in agony. 

To my own. The cesarean when my first turned breach, the cords around his neck. The inescapable fear I felt of going into that surgery. To my second birth, the one I had the blessing to experience as natural, although there is nothing natural in a 42 hour labour that tortured me beyond what I knew I could bare. 

To every mother who never experienced her baby’s first cry, the children who faded before we could embrace them in our arms. 

To all the mothers who were blessed with an experience of birth that was not so severe, to the elation, pride and joy you felt at one of the most incredible experiences. 

To the woman who themselves did not survive to meet their children. Whose bodies sacrificed to bare a new life into the world. 

Finally, to all the heartaches that yearned to bare a life, and yet it to you was not given, you too are precious, you too know pain, and may you too find joy in this life we were born to. 

Every day a million risks, a million stories, a millions moment of joy, a million moments of tragedy. And we go through these, sometimes by choice, sometimes not, for the chance to bare new life into the world. 

To every mother. To every memory.