Does Your Birth Foretell Your Life?

Year after year, birthday after birthday, I told my kids their birth story. I told the stories in painstaking detail. I described the weather, who was around, the day before, the birth , and the day after. Even when they were in college, I called them and offered the story. I tried to make the telling exactly the same. I wanted them to know.

I had asked my mother about my birth so many times. I was born in 1944, during WW11. My father was in Virginia or Georgia or one of those places, not Asia and not Europe. My mother was living with her parents in Lawrence, MA, USA. Dr. Uniac, who lived across the street delivered me. I came so fast that they never had time to do all the horrible things that were required in those days. Shave the mom, administer an enema, use stirrups, give Scopolomine, otherwise known as Twilight Sleep.

I was born in the caul. That means that the amniotic sack had not been broken. Mummy always said that it must have been so easy on me with all that nice fluid to protect my head. Because in those days they did like to yank the babies out with high forceps.

The story had a twist that always pissed off my mother. Because all those medieval tortures were in the 'standing orders', and because I came so fast, they gave her the drugs after I was born. She said twilight sleep did nothing to ease the pain, it just put your head into nightmare mode.

But it wasn't until I was attending births with Carole Leonard, training to become a midwife, that I saw the expressions and the mood of the different babies as they were born. We were attending home births, almost universally in optimal situations. The clients were educated parents who were happy to be having a baby. They were pretty universally healthy, well fed moms in quiet, softly lit, natural settings. Yet some babies emerged screaming, some with looks of terror on their faces. Others seemed to be smiling, or were so not bothered by the big event that they pretty much slept through it.

I think it is possible that the incarnating being has knowledge of what he/she is about to face in life. Some seem so happy to be born and others, well, it can't be easy. Other explanations don't make much sense to me.

I never did get into the new age thing of re-birthing, maybe because I really had no birth trauma to recollect. Maybe, one birth in this lifetime is good enough.