I was doing it. I knew I was, even as I didn’t know how this could be happening, even as I felt everything in me rotate like swallowing pool water and knowing almost immediately it was going to churn inside you all day. But even as I felt it all change, felt my body drop into something feral and otherworldly, I didn’t panic.
For some reason, none of my plans seemed to matter much at all as I rocked back and forth on my hands and knees in the sand, Emory in front of me, Simone behind me, her voice steady like this had been our intention all along, to birth my baby on the beach with no light but fire and a single flashlight.
Back before Padua Beach, I thought all I needed was a pool and just enough love to make me not feel so alone: a hand to hold, but not a soul to swallow; a friend to laugh with, but not another person to tangle with, intertwine, to welcome each other as food and friction. I thought I needed a body of water to cut through in the name of speed, but I didn’t know all I needed was a body to feel float.
And yet, after a whole life of misdirection and craving only the surface of hopes and dreams, the moment I realized I was not only in labor but minutes from birth, I knew with such clarity that this, here on this beach, was where I was fated to be, the desire I hadn’t known to dream.
The crashing of waves with my breath, these Girls who knew all the ugliest outlines of me but understood that there was something far more soft in the center, in this town where my noni raised my dad on salty air and miracles found in the booths of a tired McDonald’s. This was where the child I once thought was a burden to me would be born: into an ocean of possibility, to a mother who had grown to truly, completely want her.
“Adela, I can see her hair,” Simone said from behind me. I knew I was supposed to be on my back, that’s what the doctor said, but I didn’t want to. I felt right, belly hanging below me, scraping sand, my hands supporting me as I swayed. Simone spoke and I never imagined her voice would be such a comfort. “Don’t push, okay? Not unless your body tells you to. All those doctors lyin’ to you, trust me, if you just breathe, she’ll come out and you won’t need no stitches neither. Just breathe, keep breathing.”
I didn’t have any time to question it, I just kept doing what I was doing, shutting my eyes and swaying, opening them at the next wave and using the circle of Emory’s mouth as a mirror of my own as I groaned. I didn’t mean to make all the noise, it just came out of me. And then Emory would take a breath in and I would breathe in with her, then out again. I felt the baby’s head emerge. I felt her stretch me and then I felt her still at the neck.
“Perfect,” Simone hummed. “She’s so pretty. She’s so so pretty.”
I didn’t care if she was pretty, though. I cared if she was happy and fed and breathing, I cared if she felt my skin and heard my voice and knew these Girls were the reason I had become her mother.
Another contraction came and I felt the full force of this one, felt it like a wave that scoops you up and throws you twenty feet farther into the water, forces you to beg for breath. My hands shook and buckled, I screamed, I felt Emory slip her hands under my arms and hold me up, a lifeguard pulling me from the water.
Simone yelled, “That’s her shoulders! Wait, here she is, she’s coming, pull her up!”
I reached down through my legs and my child tumbled out of me and right into my hands. All that pressure dissipated as I sat back on my heels, held her slippery body to me, heard nothing, nothing, nothing, rubbed her back, and then one squeaky cry. I looked down at her face and let a breath out.
“That’s right,” Simone said. “You did it. Just the placenta left.”
I did it. My daughter’s wrinkled purple face squirmed on my chest and I looked into her distraught self and knew I would do it all again just to meet her. My heart swelled and burst, broke and mended, all in those moments kneeling in the sand, introducing myself to my daughter for the first time.
“I’m your mommy. I’m your mommy,” I whispered.
The Girls were quiet. The kids too. They let it be just me and my baby, me and my forever, as all those fantasies I’d had of David, Chris, a gold medal, faded to an overwhelming understanding that I could not fuck up and forget to love her well.
My daughter quieted and her lips touched my skin and she slowly crept closer and closer to my breast, looking for her life source, and I did not want to cover up how she came into this world with lies, cover up my fear of doing this all on my own with a man who was never going to show her care that was as soft as her fresh skin, cover up my young with decades of attempting to make up for an act that was not unholy, but wholly human.
Instead, I tasted salt and sand, as my daughter tasted her first lick of life and the only people in this world who knew exactly how sacred this was watched by the glow of fire, feeding on night sky and moon, and we all felt ourselves fill up, on who we were, who these nine months had made us, and I could feel that, in all the regrets we might have had, this—us, here—would never be one of them.
As though all singularly possessed, we each looked down at our babies’ faces, dimpling and delicate and so new, and thought, I wouldn’t change a thing. Because I was this child’s mother, and all of me—sun and moon, sea and sky, body and bone—would forever stand in the wild truth that I could be mother and child and freed, all at once.